Native Programmatic Brings Home Mobile Bacon For Yahoo7

With the majority of its audience now reading its news and content via mobile, Yahoo7 has added a slew of big name clients who’ve embraced its native programmatic ad format.

New clients to take up Yahoo7’s native proposition include Southern Cross Austereo, Junkee, Gumtree, Sportsmate Mobile and Onthehouse Group.

Ed Harrison, Yahoo7’s CEO, told B&T that native is all about the user perspective. “When you think of all the different environments that we offer consumers, be they male or female, whether it’s a homepage, whether it’s an environment like news, they all format differently in terms of the content that we deliver,” he said.

“Technology allows us to reformat advertising into the same form and function on different websites. That makes for a more seamless user experience and that’s particularly important when it comes to mobile.

“We’re increasingly building products in the mobile space, be it for mobile optomised sites or apps themselves. Until recently it’s been difficult to monetise those audiences because a lot of formats don’t work from a user experience point of view,” he said.

Harrison said its native uses Yahoo’s global technology that enables the creative to suit any format in the company’s stable. “It works on a cost per click basis, we’ve had enormous success across our own network and we’ve been slowly adding these units into our own network be it on our sites, our apps, our mail users. We’ve now got hundreds of adverisers using the product.”

Harrison said advertisers can integrate Yahoo7’s format onto their own sites which enables them to host Yahoo7 ads and take a revenue stream too.

One criticism of the technology and mobile generally has been that creatives hadn’t kept pace with the technology which is often a high touch and high engagement environment. While Harrison stressed that Yahoo7 had no plans to bring the creative side in-house.

“There are inherent challenges around the mobile environment in terms of limited real estate and what people are doing at the time. We’re not about bringing the creative ability in-house; the content will most likely be created by a creative agency or form part of a larger campaign driven by the agency. What we’re doing is allowing the advertiser to distribute scale in a very automated way and in a way that optomises across all these different devices and different audiences,” he said.

However, Harrison would not be drawn that it could all go asunder with the increase in ad-blocking software. He said Yahoo7 would not follow rival Ninemsn’s lead who’ve threatened to charge users who used ad-blockers while viewing its content.

“It’s a big, complex issue and there has been some kneejerk reactions to it,” he said of the recent rise of ad-blocking.

“I would say there is a lot hype around the topic and I think it will die away; but that’s not to say we don’t recognise the fact that a lot of publishers need to think hard about the user experience they’re providing and not giving people reasons to install ad-blocking technology in the first place.

“Sure, there’s a lot of talk of blocking the blockers and that has the potential to lead to an arms race and, yes, we’re yet to see how that will eventually play out,” he said.

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