Yahoo!7 is seeking to become an advertising representative for more third-party publishers as it switches up its strategy.
Commercial director Paul Sigaloff told AdNews that the Australian business is seeking to partially replicate its US parents’ model by focusing on inventory outside its own stable.
“We have a lot of owned and operated assets,” Sigaloff said, “but through doing deals with other publishers, overlaying our data onto brand-safe third-party video inventory … it’s a big opportunity for us to give clients access to that in a very transparent manner.”
In the US, Yahoo sells about 75% of its ads against off-network inventory, with the remaining 25% of ads coming from its own network.
Due to the fact it has access to premium video content through its joint venture with Seven West Media (SWM) in Australia, roughly 75% of the inventory it sells against is within network.
That, Sigaloff said, represents an opportunity for the group.
“There’s a lot of inventory out there we see ourselves getting access to,” Sigaloff said. “It’s not so much about reducing our inventory, but there’s a lot of potential revenue sitting out there that we’re not getting at the moment.”
Elsewhere, he says Yahoo!7 and Seven West are working on ways to harmonise the disparate data sets sitting within each of the businesses within a central platform.
“What we’re doing with Seven West Media is working on a centralised data warehouse, which will enable us to gain insights to all of the different consumption experiences across SWM, understand what people are doing across platforms and map those journeys,” Sigaloff said.
“Then, obviously, with those insights we can apply that to advertising.
“There’s a whole team working on that and the most complex piece around the centralisation of that – as with any company, not just SWM – there’s a lot of data across businesses, but eight times out of ten it hasn’t been."
A version of this story appeared in the latest issue of AdNews Magazine (1 May). Subscribe to AdNews in Print, or get it on iPad.
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