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Industry Trends

Yahoo! Announces New Ad Platform – APT

By September 26, 2008July 30th, 2023No Comments

Yahoo! has just unveiled a new advertising platform called APT, which they had announced was in development last year under the name AMP. The announcement was made on Wednesday, during the Advertising Week media event held in New York City.

APT is a display advertising platform. Yahoo! believes that once the platform is made available, it will simplify the whole process of advertising, as it will help advertisers reach a larger target audience, provide better performance, give a lot of insight into user needs and most importantly simplify media buying.

According to CEO Jerry Yang, who envisioned this platform 18 months ago, APT will change the face of online advertising. He and President Sue Decker had earlier called it “Nirvana”. They believe that with APT, online advertising will be revolutionized in 2009.

Before preparing this platform, Yahoo! took the trouble to find out all the difficulties that their partners have to face in the process of advertising. They found that it takes over 30 manual operations from the stage of ad strategy to ad launch, and that the whole process can take weeks to complete. Also, it is extremely difficult to locate and understand ones target audience as they are spread out across hundreds of websites.

Perhaps they should have also taken the trouble to find out about the difficulties advertisers face when advertising on Yahoo! and dealing with Yahoo! Inc.’s internal inefficiencies!
With the release of APT, Yahoo! hopes to change all that. They promise to make the ad buying and selling process simple, open and fast – they claim it should be possible to complete in minutes. However, given Yahoo!’s history of failures where it comes to ad platforms, few in the advertising industry give any credit to such loud claims.

Yahoo! Is very confident that APT will be able to deliver on all these promises, because they have received a lot of feedback from their partners during the process of development and testing of this platform. APT will initially be made available to the Newspaper Consortium and then gradually to all advertisers and publishers over the next several months, running into the next year.

Yahoo! hopes that the new technologies used in APT will bring back some credibility to their advertising offering, especially since the fiasco with Microsoft and their current deal with Google, which has done nothing but put their own ad platform, Panama in very poor light.