It’s APT to Change

Yahoo!’s new ad platform is designed to unify digital advertising, helping market players do business more simply and effectively

Today we launched our new advertising platform, APT from Yahoo!, at a media event in New York City with Jon Hamm, star of TV’s Mad Men. We believe when the new platform becomes available to advertisers, it will help them reach more quality user audiences, harness insights on those users, drive better performance and simplify media buying. Our YSM blog team has been intimately involved—working like “Mad Men,” you might say—in preparations for the launch of APT from Yahoo!, so, of course, we’ll keep you informed here of our progress and your opportunities to participate in the platform.

But for now, here’s Jerry…

I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago, when I laid out my vision for our board of directors on how Yahoo! could play a unique role in changing the face of online advertising. In fact, Sue and I called it Nirvana at the time – a platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.

Sounds like hype, right? We don’t think so. As Sue posted in April, we listened to all of the pain points that our partners shared about the process of buying and selling ads. Would you believe it takes more than 30 manual operational steps to move from ad strategy concept to launching that ad? It involves faxes (!!) and sometimes weeks in proposal processing. Audiences are now distributed across a sea of web sites and are harder to find, understand, and put a value on. Madison Avenue might think it’s a shame Johnny Walker Red doesn’t flow at the office anymore.

APT looks to change all that. It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast (like minutes vs. days). It provides a new level of control. It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before. It will provide large amounts of quality inventory. It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting. And it will drive results. All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions. No more wasted time.

For more about the new platform, read Jerry’s full blog post.

— The Team