From the beaches along the Cannes seafront, Yahoo Advertising has unveiled Yahoo Creative, its first full-stack data-powered ad creative solution – promising its clients a marriage between programmatically traded media, AI-powered personalised and optimised creative.
The new solution “future-proofs dynamic creative by activating Yahoo’s identity solution” is something that Tony Gemma, the company’s vice president, Yahoo Creative, told B&T that its clients had been calling out for.
“It’s a combination of a full-service creative team and advanced creative tools and ad serving with connectivity into our DSP,” he explained.
“It integrates the key components that bring creative and media closer together for a lot of our clients. My team has been doing creative in the programmatic space for a long time. We rolled out some dynamic offerings in the DSP back in 2021 and we found quickly that the data and our creative services were really strong assets for our clients but we didn’t have the expansive toolset that a lot of clients were leveraging outside our walls.”
Now, however, Yahoo does. The Yahoo Creative set of tools uses AI to drive real-time creative development.
“It’s working in every part of our creative workflow,” added Gemma.
“It isn’t just the optimisation layer it’s also in production. We’re using it as a companion on all the design we do. It’s just become a more efficient companion for us and it carries all the way down to delivering the creatives and having AI in the algorithms that help us deliver dynamic assets.”
His colleague Adam Roodman, senior vice president of product strategy and management for Yahoo DSP, added that the company’s two biggest investment areas on the customer-facing side were both on the insight and performance side.
“On the insights side, think of the way AI can generate a more impactful campaign optimisation insight, whether it’s supply or frequency-based. Those are designed to make our buyers smarter and save them time. That’s where we’re delivering between a 12-15 per cent increase in time saved for buyers,” he said.
“On the other side of the coin, it’s the optimisation of the campaign. That’s where we’re taking AI to bring in more data signals for better optimisation – that’s about a 10x increase in data signals from pre-AI and then processing those 90 per cent faster.”
And there are plenty of data signals. Gemma explained that it pulls data from the company’s 335 million logged-in users on Yahoo Mail and its various publishing properties around the world.
“It’s the backbone of our identity solution and it allows us to activate Dynamic Creative decisioning insights,” said Gemma.
Tools of this ilk may sound familiar. Most tech platforms are now engaged in AI-optimised creative. However, Yahoo stands slightly apart given it has a full-service creative team that Gemma runs.
“There’s a lot of go fish in the creative space. There are tools available and connected to other platforms that have no services behind them. It’s a toolset, self-serve it, you’re on your own. But I think as more channels come online, clients are having more challenges scaling creative. That’s why pairing this offering with a full-service creative team that’s been in the space for years and are experts is a really compelling offering for our clients,” he explained.
And it’s because of those clients that the tool launched in Cannes. Rather than being the advertising festival known for over-indexing on rose wine, long lunches and linen shirts, Roodman explained that it was “super efficient to meet clients in one place.”
“Our industry is incredibly dependent on interoperability between different stakeholders at different parts of the supply chain – whether you’re a media provider, creator or marketer, none of it can be done in a vacuum,” he said.
“It’s super efficient to have wide-ranging conversations and drive partnerships further and customer growth. It’s incredibly efficient the number of partner conversations I can have in three days here versus a normal day of business.”
The Yahoo Creative platform is available now to customers globally.
