See how Yahoo! integrates human insights with big data to personalize advertising

Yahoo talks about creating seamless experiences between content and advertising.

Yahoo has been surprising the market with policy changes and major acquisitions since the appointment of Marissa Mayer in July 2012 as president and CEO. Mayer has been vocal about her mission to create a personalized experience for every user and to optimize monetization.

Yahoo has indeed been serious on achieving this mission with the creation of mobile apps, the relaunch of Yahoo mail and homepage, and of course, Flickr. But how does Yahoo, being the world’s largest publisher, actually utilize its assets, which in this case, is big data? How can big data be combined with human insights to make advertising a personalized experience?

Utilizing big data
Brian Silver, Yahoo’s VP for ad platforms, says Yahoo is creating scenarios in which it can utilize big data in order to enhance the user’s experience through every interaction. The relaunched homepage, for instance, actually takes millions of pieces of data and watches what the user does at all times. It also customizes the entire experience including what content and ad gets delivered based on the user as a unique individual.

“Every single unique individual that goes to Yahoo today has his own unique personalized experience. Yahoo has created a trusted, personalized experience for the way in which any user will interact with it on any device, at any time,” he adds.

But from an advertising perspective, Silver notes that Yahoo is using ‘complex logic’ to help advertisers and marketers send their message across based on where the user is and what device they’re on.

“When you go on to your PC and look at an advertisement for the first time, maybe it’s a branding experience. Then that gets reinforced because now you’re sitting at home, watching television and you may have another experience with the ad which may be a little bit more proactive in trying to drive you down the funnel. And last is on your mobile device, now you’re actually out and about, and you see an ad again and it’s actually a call to action.” 

Creating seamless experiences
Silver notes that big data is the ability for players of significant scale to finally organize all these signals. The biggest issue, he reckons, is people don’t understand how to harness the data so they’re making decisions on the subset of the information. Big data is all around this notion of finally harnessing data to turn it into a unique experience so the advertiser can tailor their messaging to a unique individual at the right time.

“What Yahoo does is creating these seamless experiences between content and advertising which of course will end up helping the advertiser complete their mission which is driving the best return for the right price with the most efficiency,” says Silver. In fact, Yahoo recently launched streaming ads which Silver notes as their way of personalising advertising along with the content the user chooses. “We believe we’re leading the market, we’re actually the only ones I know who are doing this. Streaming ads are based not only on social signals but on all of the content of yahoo and of our partners.”

Silver notes that Asia Pacific, particularly Singapore, is completely aligned with the world leaders in digital advertising with the incredibly predominant mobile infrastructure in the region. In this highly dynamic environment, he adds that Yahoo will continue to help consumers obtain what they want and to help advertisers reach their target market.

“Yahoo is the world’s largest trusted source of content and advertising. Our mission is to inspire and delight users’ daily habits and in order to achieve that, we’re delivering a unique personalized experience for each user through content and advertising,” he concludes.