Yahoo today
detailed plans for the 'AMP!', the company's forthcoming Web advertising management system that gives its ad sales-partners access to online ad space both on Yahoo and other major sites.
The widely anticipated system, known as AMP!, aims to simplify the
process of buying and selling online ads for advertisers, ad agencies,
fast-growing ad trading networks and Web site publishers.
The ad management system seeks to capitalize on Yahoo's strength as a
Web site publisher that reaches 500 million Web users monthly and
recent efforts to sell ads off of Yahoo through major partnerships or
specialized ad-sales networks.
The planned advertising system, formerly code-named Apex, is the
lynchpin of the company's strategy to reach outside its own base of
users and increase its position as the "must buy" location for online
advertisers.
While the strategy remains in its early stages, AMP! is one of the
products which Yahoo management believes will help propel the company's next wave of growth. It is also one factor behind Yahoo's
reluctance to accept Microsoft's unsolicited takeover bid.
"AMP! from Yahoo will enable advertisers and publishers to connect with each other and their exact target audiences across the increasingly fragmented Internet, in a way that's not possible with current solutions. We believe AMP! will deliver a faster, easier, and more automated and integrated way to create, buy, and sell advertising and do so across a transparent global marketplace. And with the time saved, the industry can better focus on developing great creative," said Hilary Schneider, EVP, Global Partner Solutions, Yahoo.
AMP! will be introduced in stages starting in the third quarter of
this year, Yahoo said. It aims to give individual sites the capacity
to sell ads across the Web, replacing single-site systems that still
use e-mail and even faxes.
AMP! is a suite of tools that offers precise geographic, demographic,
and interest-based targeting across a vast network of Yahoo sites and
ad sales deals Yahoo has struck with more than 600 newspapers, Comcast
and eBay.
It also includes niche Web sites such as WebMD, Forbes, the major ad
networks, and thousands of smaller sites on the Web.
In its initial stages, AMP! is designed to expand the reach of
dedicated sales forces at newspapers or sites such as WebMD to allow
them to reach many times larger audiences outside of their own sites,
where they can cross-sell their advertising.
A video demonstration of AMP! can be viewed at http://advertising.yahoo.com/amp.