The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in underway for 2023, bringing together those that work in creative communications and advertising from every corner of the planet.
Mediaweek is on location in the South of France, chatting to some of the most influential people in both Australian and global media. Today is Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, chief revenue officer at Yahoo.
Yahoo in Cannes
Yahoo has shown up to Cannes in style, with the Yahoo Beach Club activation set up on the picturesque shoreline of Southern France. It’s not just the views that have brought the team to the festival, however.
“It’s a perfect intersection of being able to take advantage of the fact that your customers are here, and then surprising and delighting them, and giving them the opportunity to have something they can’t have somewhere else. With Yahoo Beach Club, you’re not going to just get that anywhere else,” says Herbst-Brady.
“We think about the whole year as different moments in time that get strung together by really strong business, productive relationships, and ecosystems. It’s a perfect intersection of creativity and technology.”
The Yahoo Beach Club activation also makes sense as a revenue driver, with Herbst-Brady saying that it presents “an opportunity to come together with our customers.”
“We want it to be a place that can engage people – it seems silly to just go sit in a closed-off room when you’re here. We’ve taken into account the blazing heat and the winds – you can be fed, and then there are different areas you can have a small intimate conversation or you can have a larger conversation.
“I also think it opens up people to thinking about things a bit differently, which is really important. We’re going through a remarkable transformation in this industry, and certainly in the world as well. It seems like a perfect place to do that.”
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Yahoo Beach Club
On the ground, Herbst-Brady says that there are a few topics she’s heard coming up multiple times throughout the festival, as well as in the wider industry.
“Everybody post-pandemic is grateful to be here. It’s two years later, but I think that sentiment still exists.
“People are talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. They’re talking about sustainability. Certainly, AI is predominating the conversation. Those are the loud themes, but then inside of that, it’s about how you create greater connectivity with your customers. What does a real partnership look like? A partnership isn’t many, a partnership is a few done well. That’s certainly been driving our conversations.”
Yahoo’s Business Transformation
Any successful media company that has been around for long enough will need to refresh its product occasionally, and with 30 years of history, the Yahoo team know a thing or two about making sure they’re always ahead of the curve.
“In February, we really refocused our energies to make sure that we could be completely directed towards servicing our core customers as they embark on cross-platform campaigns,” says Herbst-Brady,
“A part of that is transparency. One of the things that we’ve been hearing from clients for a while, even before we made this shift, was that they want to understand with more clarity and more simplicity, the location of their spend.
As a part of this refocus, Yahoo has launched a series of new products, the most recent being Backstage, which provides Yahoo DSP advertisers with a direct path to curated, premium publisher inventory.
“We’ve launched with over 100 publishers already,” Herbst-Brady says of Yahoo Backstage. “A lot of times you create a product and you hope they will come – we launch a product, and they are here.”
Backstage is far from the only new product that Yahoo has brought to market recently, and Herbst-Brady says that there are some stand-out things that the people in the market are wanting.
“Our focus is the advertising community, our technology is in service of the advertisers, and we have to enable connection to content. What we hear and understand is there’s a greater desire to have transparency, understanding, and clarity. We had an announcement a couple of weeks ago with Adelaide, which is going to allow clients to understand a measure of attention.
“We also recently had an announcement with Samba TV – we actually started having that conversation last year here at Cannes, and followed up in AdWeek in Australia. We finally landed it because again, to go back to what our customers need, they want to be able to have omnichannel and cross platform measurement between television, video, and display. To do that, you need different datasets, and the Samba TV data set is going to be critical to that.
“People want transparency, performance, and accountability across the ecosystem. For a very long time, advertisers have wanted to be able to bring these together.”
Yahoo in Cannes
As for what’s next for Yahoo? Focussing on getting the goal of the business done, and done well.
“We’re just going to keep being focused on delivering what our clients want,” says Herbst-Brady. “It’s a wonderful situation to be in, to be completely focused on what they want. In some cases, we will build it ourselves, in other cases, we’ll have partnerships like we do with Taboola, which we announced back last November. We’re going to be focused on delivering what we need to deliver, and then just keeping our eyes and ears open.”
In January, Yahoo and Taboola closed their 30-year exclusive commercial agreement to make Taboola the exclusive native advertising partner for all of Yahoo’s digital properties.
“It signals to everybody, including ourselves, that this is a very strategic partnership. We’re in it for the long haul, we’re not going to do things to cut corners, we’re going to do the right things for our customers, and we’re going to do the right things for the publishers. We want to be the best in class in the native marketplace,” says Herbst-Brady.
Yahoo in Australia
Despite currently being on the other side of the world, Herbst-Brady reflects on the Australian market by calling it “really exciting and innovative.”
“The passion for the business there is palpable. My first time there amongst the industry was last year with AdWeek, and I was overwhelmed in a positive way with the enthusiasm, the creativity, and certainly the love for the Yahoo brand – but also for the possibilities of what we can make.
See Also: Yahoo’s Elizabeth Herbst-Brady on the future of digital marketing in Australia and overseas
“That’s a really exciting thing, we’re not the Yahoo of yesteryear, we’re a very new Yahoo, but there are some really good foundational pieces that give us a lot to push off.”
Finally, when asked what her most used Yahoo products are, Herbst-Brady has a list of favourites.
“I really use the Yahoo Finance app, just because it’s just such a great source of information. We also have something called In The Know which is a combination of entertainment and custom creativity that I really like. In our DSP, I love our cross-platform measurement.”
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Top Image: Elizabeth Herbst-Brady