With Yahoo Creative, advertisers can use real-time insights to hone in on their creativity and develop more relevant ads.
The only thing consistent in advertising is change, and the keys to thriving amongst the recurring shifts are innovation, adaptability, and a deep understanding of client needs. Yahoo Creative, under the leadership of Tony Gemma, embodies these principles. Announced at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Yahoo designed Yahoo Creative to help alleviate the challenges advertisers face in programmatic. Its services promise to deliver personalized ad experiences alongside cookie deprecation.
Integrating the Yahoo DSP provides a seamless connection between ad creative and programmatic media buying. It helps streamline the execution process since its capabilities lead to better creative workflows and planning tools. It also helps simplify the advertising activation process for advertisers, offering more integrated campaign management that drives consolidation and efficiency.
As an omni-channel DSP with unique first-party identity solutions, Yahoo saw an opportunity to create a unique offering in the marketplace and did just that. The strategy behind Yahoo Creative was shaped by feedback from clients, who stressed the need for creative tools backed by trusted identity solutions.
Yahoo Creative’s collaboration with Innervate leverages Yahoo’s first-party data and creative services with Innervate’s advanced creative tools, enabling the delivery of personalized, high-quality creative at scale. This not only enhances Yahoo Creative’s own DSP but also provides clients globally with a comprehensive solution to meet the industry’s growing demands, demonstrating Yahoo’s commitment to ecosystem interoperability.
In this interview, Tony Gemma, VP, Global Head of Yahoo Creative, highlights the inspiration behind Yahoo Creative, its features, and how it is the new game-changer for buyers.
Yakira Young: What inspired the development of Yahoo Creative?
Tony Gemma: As an ad creative service organization, we’ve witnessed the friction advertisers face when activating creative in a growing programmatic ecosystem. As the identity landscape evolves, advertisers face additional challenges in finding ways to deliver high-quality and relevant experiences to users.
Much of our strategy was driven by feedback from our clients — to expand advanced creative tools and services backed by a future-proofed strategy and deliver personalized ad experiences in a cookie-less future. With our position in the marketplace and our full-service creative team’s support, Yahoo positioned itself to invest in something new and differentiated for the marketplace. Offerings that will be particularly valuable in driving better advertising outcomes for our clients.
YY: How did the partnership with Innervate come about, and what role does Innervate play?
TG: We previously tested dynamic creative in the Yahoo DSP and quickly found that Yahoo’s first-party data and creative services were strong assets for our clients. However, we didn’t have the expansive toolset that many clients were leveraging outside our walls. Our partnership with Innervate allows us to pair advanced creative tools with our talented full-service creative team and Yahoo’s unique Identity Solutions to scale personalized and high-quality creative to drive better client outcomes.
YY: How does Yahoo Creative address the challenges of identity changes in online ad-targeting?
TG: Yahoo Creative is backed by Yahoo Identity Solutions, which encompasses Yahoo ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions. Direct consumer relationships power these solutions, and a robust first-party dataset of over 205 million logged-in users in the U.S. Yahoo Creative ensures that dynamic creative remains relevant and engaging, even in a cookie-less environment. This approach helps maintain personalization and audience engagement, thus overcoming the hurdles posed by evolving identity standards.
YY: How does the first-party dataset of over 205M logged-in users enhance campaign targeting and personalization?
TG: Yahoo’s first-party dataset enhances campaign targeting and personalization by providing rich consumer insights and behavioral data sources. This data allows Yahoo Creative to develop highly personalized and relevant ad content that resonates with target audiences without using legacy cookie solutions. Leveraging such a vast and accurate dataset ensures that campaigns are precisely targeted, improving engagement and overall campaign performance.
YY: In what ways has the lag in the evolution of creative tools impacted advertising effectiveness?
TG: Overall, our research has shown that creativity is one of the biggest drivers of advertising outcomes compared to media placement. In fact, we recently published research in partnership with IPG/Magna that showed 56% of purchase intent was driven by creative quality. Despite that, Yahoo and Advertiser Perceptions polled advertisers about their experiences in launching ad campaigns, and 95% noted that they face challenges when building and managing creative for ad campaigns.
This is a huge gap in advertisers’ value chains, and we are uniquely equipped to help bridge the gap between creative and media to drive better outcomes for our advertisers.
YY: How does Yahoo Creative leverage data and technology to bridge the gap in creative capabilities?
TG: Yahoo Creative is built with an expansive toolset of creative authoring and visual planning tools that allow for the intersection of beautiful, interactive creative with the scale and personalization of real-time dynamic creative execution and optimization. This combination allows for eloquent and high-quality interactive creative backed by cookie-less creative targeting parameters leveraging Yahoo’s Identity Solutions. It allows advertisers to create personalized, engaging, and scalable ad content across multiple channels.
YY: What are the key features of Yahoo Creative that set it apart from other ad creative solutions?
TG: We developed Yahoo Creative with ease of activation in mind, taking into consideration some of the challenges we’ve seen advertisers face when activating creative programmatically:
- Full-Service Creative Expertise – Many creative offerings are built solely for self-serve. At Yahoo Creative, we offer our consultation and omnichannel expertise from ideation to iteration, including insights, planning, design, development, campaign set-up, and optimization to drive better results for our client’s advertising.
- Future-Proof Personalization – Dynamic Creative is a growing opportunity for advertisers to deliver the most relevant creative to users while increasing efficiency with real-time optimization. As cookie deprecation continues to loom, Yahoo’s First Party Identity Solutions will help advertisers maintain addressability and scale intelligently to non-addressable audiences with their creative campaigns.
- Quality Creative Everywhere – Yahoo Creative is an omnichannel solution that supports various ad formats and platforms, including CTV, mobile, display, DOOH, and more. Although Yahoo Creative is connected with the Yahoo DSP, it is also designed to be interoperable with other DSPs and media-buying platforms. It ensures consistent and impactful creative across all platforms, allowing advertisers to reach their audiences effectively wherever they are.
- Inclusive Pricing—Advertisers often face challenges from long-term contracts, variable rate cards, or hidden fees for creative production or design. Yahoo Creative can be activated with no contracts, transparent rates, and no hidden production or design fees. This ensures complete pricing transparency, paying only on a usage-based pricing model, eliminating the need for tedious price negotiations. Moreover, you receive dedicated, full-service support throughout the entire process.
YY: Can you explain how Yahoo Creative’s AI and data principles work in real-time creative development?
TG: Yahoo Creative leverages AI in several stages of the creative process. It has become a valuable tool in production, offering capabilities like image creation, image editing, image fill, and more that can speed up design or scale asset iteration. Yahoo Creative also leverages robust campaign optimization tools that allow for real-time multivariate testing to automatically pause underperforming creative or elements, ensuring optimization to the highest-performing advertisements.
YY: How has Princess Cruises utilized Yahoo Creative, and what results have they seen?
TG: Princess Cruise leveraged Yahoo Creative’s full-service expertise to build a series of animated advertisements across multiple formats to drive brand awareness. Princess Cruise has seen positive performance and has noted that Yahoo’s demand-side technology combined with integrated creative solutions is a powerful offering for driving successful advertising executions.
YY: How does Yahoo Creative ensure consistency and impact across different advertising channels like CTV, mobile, and DOOH?
TG: Yahoo Creative ensures consistency and impact across different advertising channels by offering an omnichannel solution that works seamlessly across CTV, mobile, display, DOOH, etc. The platform’s advanced technology enables the creation of adaptable ad content that maintains its effectiveness and engagement across various formats and devices. This ensures advertisers can deliver a unified and impactful message to their audience, regardless of the channel.
YY: Can you share some insights on the nearly 10,000 pieces of creative the team developed in 2023?
TG: Yahoo Creative has years of experience building creative, and we compile best practices across verticals, formats, and features. These extensive insights drive our consultative approach to working with clients to meet their unique creative needs and drive more effective creative performance. Whether advertisers are looking to drive brand awareness, drive site traffic, sales lift, or tune-in, our experts combine the science of our data and insights with the art of our craft to offer holistic solutions that deliver high-quality experiences that move the needle for brands.
YY: How does Yahoo Creative support Interactive Authoring, and what benefits does this bring to advertisers?
TG: Interactive authoring powers beautiful, interactive advertising experiences across channels. The Yahoo Creative team are experts in interactive creative and it is an area where advanced technology and art come together to offer eloquent user-led experiences. It affords us the ability to add unique features like QR codes, touchpoints, gamification, and more. We often see that the addition of animation or interaction can drive tremendous lift in engagement.
YY: How do you see Yahoo Creative evolving in the next few years?
TG: Yahoo Creative represents a major technological advancement in advertising, bringing robust creative tools closer to media. We are committed to its ongoing development. We will continue to innovate and enhance its capabilities, ensuring that it remains at the forefront of creative solutions for advertisers.
We aim to empower brands and agencies to achieve greater personalization, engagement, and superior campaign results. Over the next few years, we’ll listen to our partners and expand capabilities that further advance their needs and drive positive outcomes in their marketing campaigns.