Some of the informal comments and conversations that immediately followed the 90-minute discussion were along the lines of “We’ve heard this before, what’s new?” or “Where’s the vision?”

During the Q&A portion of the session Irving stumbled a bit when asked by the BBC’s Maggie Shields to sum up what Yahoo was in a sentence. He rattled off a list of things.

Indeed, Irving had said during his opening, “People have seen Yahoo as disassociated set of verticals. Going forward there’s going to be ‘one Yahoo.’ You’re going to see us transition to an on network and off network player — something that you take with you and not as much as a place where you go.”

This sort of thing has been said before (remember YOS?).

During his opening remarks Irving laid out some elements (literally as a periodic table) of Yahoo’s “new” strategy:

• Building an ecosystem outside the Yahoo network: both ads and content. Irving suggests that Yahoo might create a “content exchange” like the RightMedia ads exchange. There will also be a focus on third party sites
• Personal relevance through data. Irving says 50% of Yahoo’s 600 million log in. “We are going to be striving for 100% authentication over the next three years.” (By honoring OpenID and not just Yahoo IDs.)
• Be where the consumer is (mobile and tablets will be equally important)
• Social: own real social relationships on the web. He implies that Yahoo’s social strategy involves smaller groups than large public networks
• Best in class services: Irving asserts that this is Yahoo’s challenge/task across devices

Beyond these principles, Irving previewed a few specifics: a rebuilt Yahoo Mail with speed and design improvements, some search UI changes that would be more visually pleasing and enable users to “act” on search results more than today. Irving said, “We’re going to bring you as close to that ‘answer’ as possible” (including conducting transactions from the search results page).

There was also a brief visual tease of a forthcoming iPad app for Yahoo that looked pretty nicely designed.

After Irving, CTO Raymie Stata got up and talked about bringing a “search mindset” to the whole of Yahoo and infusing everything being done with “big science” to generate “awesome experiences.” He went on to discuss Yahoo’s architecture and infrastructure, saying that many changes had been made to lay the groundwork for a “faster, more iterative” approach to product development going forward (to use Irving’s words).

Though both men were passionate and articulate the discussion felt a bit like a meal without the entree. But then I went into the hall, which not everyone did, and saw some of the product demos and talked to some of the product people about specifics. After those conversations my perception of things changed considerably.

Reporters who wrote their stories “in the room” without the benefit of seeing the demos only heard what sounded like a familiar aspirational speech. But if you actually saw some of the product specifics it put some interesting “meat on the bones” of Irving and Stata’s general remarks.

Asked to discuss my reactions immediately following the press conference, I told the BBC that Yahoo has “strong products and strong content but they don’t have . . . . products that have gotten people excited.” I told the Wall Street Journal that “They need to show up with sexy, exciting stuff to regain some of their old credibility.” These were my immediate, quick reactions to the general and short-on-specifics speeches. But I felt differently after speaking to the product people.

Out in the hall I saw:

• A new version of Yahoo Messenger than includes a “Face Time” like PC-to-smartphone video chat capability
• A better looking and seemingly faster Yahoo Mail
• A very well-designed version of Yahoo for the iPad (nothing like the browser version) that was visually rich and capable of customization
• Some impressive new rich media ad units
• A much improved version of Yahoo Groups that was visually more pleasing and seemingly more useful
• A partly new search interface with some intriguing possibilities, including the presentation of rich display ads in the “accordion” module at the top of results:

Yahoo Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that this accordion module, which allows users to quickly browse through information, was testing very well and would be coming this fall. Whether you like it or not personally it’s the kind of thing that Yahoo has said it was going to do in the post-Bing era: innovate on top of the Microsoft index.

I came away from these and a couple of other discussions thinking (in contrast to my immediate remarks) maybe Yahoo doesn’t need a single big vision. Maybe that’s not possible given Yahoo’s legacy. Instead, maybe it just needs to do what it does already but do it better and update it more frequently. In other words make its products better and easier to use and bring out improvements more rapidly. (There are some who might argue it has lost some of the engineering talent required to do so.)

Yet this is precisely what Blake Irving said that Yahoo would do now: “iterate more rapidly.” In a sense Yahoo doesn’t need lots of flashy new stuff so much as it needs to stop neglecting some of the assets it already owns. That was acknowledged to me several times in my demo-related conversations. Yahoo Groups is a case-in-point.

Yahoo says it has 10 million groups, with a total of 115 million users globally. By comparison, MySpace officially claims just over 120 million users globally (though “active” users may be fewer). Groups was a social network of sorts before there were social networks.

Yahoo has in the past tried to turn Mail into a social network but Yahoo Groups is already a version of what Google has been considering around smaller sets of connections; it has just been long neglected. A better designed and more functional Yahoo Groups, which is what I saw, could represent a major avenue into “social networking” and it’s already there.

I’m not entirely reversing myself here. I do think that new and exciting products would help Yahoo. But I also believe that if Yahoo can do a better job of developing what it already has it can not only retain but grow usage and regain some of its lost “mojo” — whatever that is exactly.

Display advertising has been battered in this recession despite plenty of empirical evidence that it works as a branding medium and as a stimulus for search behavior. Behavioral targeting (BT) has been the subject of a great deal of focus over the past two or so years as a way to revive display advertising by boosting its performance. Yahoo is one of the big practitioners of BT and is arguing that it is starting to see search-like performance from some of its display campaigns.

Those campaigns are using all the complex layers of targeting that Yahoo offers (geo, BT, demo). In addition, the company is presenting different creative elements and copy to users in the context of that targeting through its dynamic SmartAds platform. SmartAds was launched in 2007 originally. At the time it launched I wrote about it:

Yahoo has been offering these various flavors of targeting, including behavioral targeting, for some time. The really new thing about SmartAds is the “creative assembly platform,” for which Yahoo has applied for a patent. The idea, according to Paez, is to take “templates” of advertiser-generated creative (e.g., copy, logos, graphics) and assemble those elements dynamically depending on the targeting opportunity. An 18-year-old woman in New England looking for hybrid vehicles, for example, might see a different ad from the same marketer than a 50-year-old male in Texas.

It’s really a form of quasi-real time multivariate testing (if that makes sense). As indicated, the Yahoo Search Marketing blog reports that SmartAds see search-level ROI:

So far, advertisers testing Smart Ads have seen significantly improved campaign performance based on a variety of metrics, including click performance, conversion and overall return on investment.

For example, after executing several Smart Ad campaigns with Yahoo! and its partners, Hewlett-Packard saw a return on ad spend that was more than 20 times higher than their traditional display campaigns, and on par with their search marketing campaigns.

Yahoo is now starting to bring third parties into the SmartAds program as part of its larger YOS initiative:

The program now helps deliver Smart Ads at greater scale by combining Yahoo!’s reach and user knowledge with innovative ad-serving technology from third-party providers. Smart Ads is an open platform, but Yahoo! is initially working with two partners, Teracent and Tumri, to make Smart Ads available to PC and mobile advertisers.

Accordingly Yahoo’s SmartAds also extends to mobile, where dynamic ad serving and changing creative based on location and other variables are actually critical to realize the “LBS opportunity.” As I wrote on the Local Mobile Search blog:

Agencies and marketers can’t create 300 separate ad units for every major city and ad copy permutation. Thus being able to deliver the right ad with the right copy on the fly is critical to creating the “inventory” required to capitalize on LBS whether online or, even more importantly, in mobile.

Though there are potential privacy issues that loom on the horizon for BT and the advanced targeting methodologies that SmartAds embody, it represents the future for both online and mobile display advertising.

The central idea is very simple: simplification of buying and selling advertising across the internet. The first customers — indeed the apparent drivers of the initiative — are Yahoo’s newspaper partners.

Search is not a part of APT at this point. But previously Yahoo President Sue Decker said that it would encompass all ad types and formats across Yahoo and its partner network: We are building a cutting edge ad platform that runs across all formats, whether it is search, display, video. It is capable of harnessing the power of Yahoo and the power off Yahoo. But it will also take advantage of emerging formats like mobile, all in an easy to use system.

APT was formally unveiled in New York today, with an appearance by Jon Hamm, the actor who plays advertising executive Don Draper on the popular AMC show Mad Men. Lots of sweeping and dramatic claims are being made for APT and how it will affect online advertising.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang blogged about the launch:

Our confidence in APT’s ability to transform the marketplace isn’t based on theory or conjecture. It’s because of the feedback we’ve been hearing from partners who have been working with us side-by-side as we developed and then began testing the platform. In fact, William Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News Group (parent company of the San Jose Mercury News), also joined us on stage today, using words like “extraordinary and “sea-change” to describe how APT will take MNG into the future.

Yang characterized it as a “platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.”

Google, AOL and Microsoft all have their own “next generation” ad platforms in the works or various stages of development. For example, just yesterday AOL announced its own: BidPlace.

Clearly APT is consistent with what advertisers, agencies and publishers want: reach, targeting and simplification. But we’ll get to see in the coming months whether it can deliver for them — and for Yahoo.

This is an expansion of Yahoo’s opt-out program for third-party networks. This was done in response to the inquiry by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. You can read a bit more about that over here.

The idea is to allow Yahoo and its partners — initially the members of the newspaper consortium — to sell ads on each others’ sites and throughout the network. The ads will at first be CPM-based graphical ads. Eventually the system will encompass the full range of ad types and formats, including video, search, and mobile advertising. It will also bring the full range of targeting capabilities to marketers across those formats and participating properties.

According to the WSJ:

Yahoo executives said they expected to begin releasing AMP in the third quarter for use by newspaper companies that are part of an existing Yahoo ad-sales consortium, and eventually extend it to additional Web publishers, advertisers, agencies and online-ad networks. The company said the system, in a future stage, will handle ad types besides display, such as search, mobile and video.

With the AMP system, Web publishers are expected to be able to manage the ads on their sites, as well as sell ads on behalf of other participants in exchange for a commission. Advertisers could buy online ads across a range of sites using standardized geographic, demographic and other targeting.

The AMP platform capabilities and vision are impressive. However, lurking in the background is the proposed acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft. My sense is that Microsoft very much believes that AdCenter is superior to Panama and is likely to be equally skeptical about the claims regarding the new platform. If the merger happens, therefore, it casts doubt on whether Yahoo will ever be fully “AMP’d.”

Perhaps analogous to AOL’s Platform A effort, it attempts to knit all of Yahoo’s recent acquisitions and ad network properties together (e.g., RightMedia, Blue Lithium). The Times quotes Decker on the potential capabilities and intention behind the platform:

We are building a cutting edge ad platform that runs across all formats, whether it is search, display, video. It is capable of harnessing the power of Yahoo and the power off Yahoo. But it will also take advantage of emerging formats like mobile, all in an easy to use system.

I would imagine this is more conceptual than real at this point. Certainly this sort of simplified ad buying across the Yahoo network, and third party sites, would be welcomed by marketers. It’s an impressive and ambitious program.

If Microsoft succeeds in acquiring Yahoo, however, it’s unlikely that Apex will come to fruition.

It’s part of Yahoo’s push to create “the largest and most effective online ad network globally.” That network includes the recently acquired RightMedia Exchange. The company will apparently operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo and will report into Hilary Schneider’s new organization.

Most of what BlueLithium does is behavioral or demographic targeting, which has recently seen a big push by Yahoo via its new SmartAds platform. This acquisition can be seen as partly defensive and partly offensive in an effort to retain brand advertisers that have more choices today and to build out a broad and efficient online ad network that offers huge reach (incl. beyond Yahoo), as well as targeting and search.

Not long ago AOL acquired BT ad network Tacoda.

From the WSJ article:

Using SmartAds, advertisers provide Yahoo with sets of backgrounds, images and text that can be mixed and matched on the fly to create an all but unlimited number of different ads. The approach combines technologies Yahoo developed itself with others it acquired. Bringing together this creative zip with the ability to target users based on interest and location, brings to display advertising the flexibility and direct-response qualities that have fueled the boom in search advertising. Yahoo hopes SmartAds will help it gain ground in the rapidly expanding market for behaviorally targeted ads, which is expected to jump to $1 billion in the U.S. in 2008 from $575 million this year, according to eMarketer.

Yahoo recently consolidated search and display advertising under David Karnstedt, who runs North American ad sales at Yahoo. The company also recently released research showing a lift when search and display ads are used together as part of an online ad campaign.

The “creative assembly platform” described in the article excerpt above is perhaps the most interesting aspect of SmartAds. But behavioral targeting, which is the current rage in online advertising (AOL recently bought Tacoda), is gaining new scrutiny even as its stock is rising. In November, the U.S. US Federal Trade Commission is holding a forum in Washington, DC to address consumer and privacy groups’ concerns “raised by the practice of tracking consumers’ activities online to target advertising.”

SmartAds have been successfully tested over the past four to five months in the travel category, and they will eventually roll out across the larger Yahoo network and ultimately on RightMedia and other partner sites.

While SmartAds won’t replace pure branding in all circumstances, they will provide brand and display advertisers with the option to target audiences based on demographic, geographic or behavioral profiles – or a mix of all three.

Yahoo has been offering these various flavors of targeting, including behavioral targeting, for some time. The really new thing about SmartAds is the "creative assembly platform," for which Yahoo has applied for a patent. The idea, according to Paez, is to take "templates" of advertiser-generated creative (e.g., copy, logos, graphics) and assemble those elements dynamically depending on the targeting opportunity. An 18-year-old woman in New England looking for hybrid vehicles, for example, might see a different ad from the same marketer than a 50-year-old male in Texas.

Yahoo can also take offers or inventory feeds and present "the right offer at the right time" via SmartAds, Paez said. Accordingly, it can make graphical advertising and branding perform much more like direct response and search. It offers something of a cure for so-called "banner blindness." (See, for example, "Marketers Seek a Banner-Blindness Cure," from the Wall Street Journal).

When questioned about how personal this ad platform could get, Paez was careful to stress Yahoo’s privacy policy and explain that users are grouped into categories and subcategories but not individually targeted. A range of behaviors, including search queries, are factored into the determination of what ads are served to what users.

As a practical matter, Paez also emphasized, marketers want large audience segments and if those audiences are "too thinly sliced," they’re not going to be interested. But SmartAds effectively allows brand marketers to target the head and the tail more efficiently. Paez added that Yahoo hoped direct response marketers would also be attracted to the new offering because of combination of branding and direct response elements.

Microsoft currently offers geographic, demographic and behavioral targeting, but the "creative assembly platform" component of Yahoo SmartAds is unique. Google offers various targeting options, though not behavioral targeting currently. However, through search personalization and other efforts, it can reasonably be expected that Google will eventually introduce some form of behavioral targeting.