Yahoo, at 30, looks back to help forge its new advertising identity

In Yahoo’s New York office there is a scaled-down replica of the classic neon billboard that stood prominently in San Francisco for more than a decade before coming down in 2011, and versions of which have hung from Los Angeles to Times Square. The sign, besides being a retro relic of the dot-com days, contains a relevant message for today’s digital ad buyers, calling Yahoo “A nice place to stay on the internet.” Turning 30 this year, Yahoo still wants to be known as a snug harbor online. It is one of the signals the company’s newly reconfigured sales team is sending to advertisers who are dealing with an internet still rife with frightening pockets of ad inventory. This year, the company launched Yahoo Ads, a sales team that goes directly to ad agencies and brands to sell digital ads on its owned-and-operated properties, including the Yahoo homepage, Sports, Finance and Mail. “I could easily make the argument that there is probably no safer brand or portfolio of sites than Yahoo,” said Rob Wilk, who returned to Yahoo last year as global head of consumer sales before ascending to chief revenue officer in August. The digital ad industry has been fraught with low-quality inventory. Brands are fearful of popping up on unsafe sites—sometimes even criminal ones. Advertisers have concerns about the “open web,” in which programmatic ads, sold in real-time online auctions, fund unscrupulous publishers running “made for advertising” sites. The so-called MFA websites are designed to run banner and video ads, racking up fees and risks for advertisers in the process. Yahoo’s programmatic ads team, in charge of the demand-side platform, has tried to position itself as a brand-safety oasis. In 2023, when the scourge of MFAs reemerged as a hot issue, Yahoo partnered with Jounce Media, a programmatic supply chain management firm, to free Yahoo’s ad tech platform of spammy inventory. Yahoo’s DSP has earned a fairly positive reputation in ad tech land, competing with the likes of Google’s Display and Video 360, The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP. Yahoo also has evolved its DSP like its rivals to create closer connections with publishers, such as with Disney in connected TV ad inventory, and to offer curation services that have tighter controls over the supply path. However, instead of putting all the onus on programmatic, Wilk also recently reorganized the team that sells Yahoo Ads directly to advertisers. Wilk is Yahoo purple through and through, having worked in ad sales at the company from 2005 to 2008 and again from 2009 to 2012 before spending eight years leading Microsoft’s ads team. Data-Driven Marketing Playbook Join us May 22 in NYC to explore how data powers marketing Learn more here More things change Those were different times, though, and under different Yahoo regimes. Today, Yahoo is owned by Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that saved the famous internet brand from near oblivion after buying it from Verizon in 2021 for approximately $5 billion. That same year, Apollo named Jim Lanzone—who previously led dating app Tinder—as Yahoo’s CEO. Wilk’s return, the Yahoo Ads push and its 30th birthday have the company feeling a bit nostalgic. The history of Yahoo, founded in a trailer on Stanford University campus by Jerry Yang and David Philo, tracks the history of the internet and internet advertising. Yahoo’s brand campaigns, starting with its commercials in the late 1990s to early 2000s asking “Do you Yahoo?” are a time capsule to the web’s first boom-and-bust cycle. Yahoo’s exact age is a little nebulous. Technically, Yang and Philo founded “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” in 1994, but it became Yahoo! when it was incorporated as a company in March 1995. The company considers this year its 30th birthday and even marked it with a regional Super Bowl commercial. The ad, its first in-game Super Bowl ad buy since 2002, featured Bill Murray sharing his Yahoo Mail address, testimony to the staying power of the brand and how people still consider yahoo.com their home online. No one doubts Yahoo is a highly trafficked website, and it’s had a remarkably steady run in that regard. In December 2010, Comscore’s widely followed Media Metrix rankings had Yahoo at No. 1 ahead of Google in the U.S. The latest Comscore Top 50 Multi-Platform Properties U.S. ranking from December 2024 has Yahoo right at No. 2, below Google (or Alphabet, its parent company). “They have three of the most visited topical sites in sports, entertainment and finance, it’s still great,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. Nelson holds a special candle for Yahoo, given his ties to its original branding. In 1993, Nelson founded Organic, a digital ad agency in San Francisco, out of which also came Accrue Software, an analytics startup with an office across the street from Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California. Nelson even played a part in designing one of Yahoo’s early logos, a design that inspired many variations of the brand’s monicker, and the one that adorned the famous billboard. “Yahoo, they were like friends and neighbors and collaborators and, you know, I’m proud to have kind of been there at the beginning,” Nelson said. Reminiscences are nice, but the history wasn’t all triumphant “Yahoooooos.” The tech innovator missed more than it hit. Google, founded in 1998, has become a $2 trillion company, and search became the true web portal. Meta, founded as Facebook in 2004, is a $1.6 trillion company. In 2013, under CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion, trying to right the ship for the social media age. In 2019, two years after Yahoo was acquired by Verizon, Verizon offloaded Tumblr for a reported $3 million. Under Apollo, Yahoo has been mostly a programmatic ad tech company. It has pared down its publishing assets to those fundamental Yahoo domains and apps. Last week, Yahoo sold TechCrunch, one of the websites Apollo wound up owning in the Yahoo deal with Verizon. Yahoo Mail is an important component of its ad tech ecosystem. And email acts as a potent online identifier for a company that relies on ad targeting. Yahoo is No. 2 in email services behind Google in the U.S., according to Comscore. Also, one-third of U.S. adults visit Yahoo Mail monthly, according to Yahoo. Data-Driven Marketing Playbook—everything you need to know The first-party data derived from logged-in users, consumers who have a one-to-one affiliation with Yahoo’s properties, powers ad targeting. Wilk calls that “a beautiful advantage for our DSP.” “I love to tell people this, we have search, we have mail, and we have browse,” Wilk said. “When you put it that way, ‘search, mail and browse,’ that helps us understand what content people consume. Obviously, there’s data. We understand that.” Lanzone hired Wilk to expand beyond programmatic into the direct deals with brands, so they have more customized campaigns across Yahoo’s websites on desktop and mobile. As a private company, Yahoo does not report ad revenue or other key stats, including how big its ad sales team is. However, Wilk said he wants to double the size of the direct sales team this year. “For a very long time, advertising here was outsourced,” Lanzone said in an interview with Ad Age. “It was purely programmatic and not directly sold. So, it is interesting to bring Rob back, who was here back when they were doing direct sales of Yahoo.” More they stay the same The first ads ever on Yahoo—conceived as a web portal with links—were also directly sold, like what the company is trying to do today with Yahoo Ads. Yang and Philo wanted to fund the site through banner ads. Yahoo called them sponsorships back then. The names of Yahoo’s first advertisers are lost to the history of the internet. A Yahoo spokesperson couldn’t cite the original sponsors when asked by Ad Age. But the first ad slots were filled by brands in telecom, banking, gaming and a few other sectors, the spokesperson said. “If you look back at our heritage, the idea of integrating brands into properties, Yahoo invented that,” Wilk said, pointing to a couple of recent deals as examples of where the ad sales team is headed—car maker Acura and payment app Venmo sponsored NCAA March Madness coverage on Yahoo this month. Wilk helped introduce Yahoo Ads at CES in Las Vegas this year, and the company plans to host a NewFront presentation in May, when all the major digital properties pitch advertisers on content and ad tech. Last year, Yahoo hosted a NewFront presentation that served as a mini concert with rockstar Beck rather than a formal sales pitch from executives. This year, Yahoo has something to sell, and to prove, Wilk said. “I just think we are finally ready to engage publicly in a way that I don’t think we have in a while,” Wilk said. Yahoo’s ad prospects outside of programmatic are murky, said a top marketing leader at a major brand, who spoke with Ad Age on the condition of anonymity. Yahoo’s internet publishing properties are unlikely to stun advertisers, the major marketer said. “There’s no scarcity in the digital video marketplace,” the major marketer from the brand said. “So what are you showing up to Yahoo’s NewFront for, and why are you committing money? Who is committing a big deal to Yahoo, because there’s not a reason to anymore, you know? I mean, it’s not like we buy Yahoo’s homepage.” Wilk acknowledged he has to make the case to advertisers, reminding them that Yahoo is still relevant. “25 years ago, Yahoo’s pitch was like, we’re No. 1 one, we’re the biggest,” Wilk said. “And in those days, you could actually sell it just based on that … now lots of people have scale.” Yahoo’s DSP has made strides into connected TV. In January, Yahoo announced a deal with Roku to use the Yahoo ConnectID, a targeting tool built on Yahoo’s first-party data, to buy ads on connected TV. Ad Age’s TV upfronts and NewFronts 2025 calendar Wilk’s team is setting up meetings with major media-buying agencies in the coming weeks, according to another ad insider who also spoke with Ad Age on the condition of anonymity. This month, to mark its 30th anniversary, Lanzone invited Yang to an all-hands meeting to speak to the new Yahoo generation, although there are still workers at the company from the last time Yang was CEO in 2012. Lanzone commissioned a “This Is Your Life” style slideshow for Yang, depicting various milestones from his time at the company. Yang still has an investment in Apollo-owned Yahoo. For Lanzone, his focus is on setting up Yahoo to last another 30 years from now and beyond, he told Ad Age. Apollo hasn’t set a timeframe to either take Yahoo public again or revealed its long-term plans for the company. Like its rivals, Yahoo is talking about developing more AI for its consumer products and within its ad tech. For instance, Wilk envisioned how ChatGPT-style generative AI could help, say, Yahoo Sports fans with their fantasy teams. Also, AI is becoming a core instrument within the programmatic platform, as it fuses data and identity signals to make smarter ad decisions. “A lot of our products are things that are so fundamental to people’s lives,” Lanzone said, “but the technologies that help service them are different, AI being the most important example right now.” Yahoo almost didn’t survive its stewardship as a brand under Verizon from 2017 to 2021. The telecom giant tried to meld Yahoo and AOL into a short-lived entity called Oath. Now, Yahoo is reclaiming some of its old identity, partly through the Yahoo Ads plan, which elevates those foundational properties and packages them for brands. “Hopefully, it makes sense to everybody why we would be going and selling directly again,” Lanzone said. “We have a very direct relationship with, especially on Mail, so many users,” Lanzone said. “We’re their login, we’re their username, we’re their homebase on the internet. So in our own way, we’re still the old Yahoo, like the billboard used to say … a nice place to stay on the internet.” ~ ~ ~CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this story described the wrong version of the Yahoo logo that Jonathan Nelson helped design.

Yahoo, at 30, looks back to help forge its new advertising identity

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