Yahoo Looks To Personalization; Channels Merging

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Googling Yahoo

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher hears a rumor that Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro is spearheading a project that is intended to revamp the portal’s content distribution and presentation system. Dubbed “Project Zed,” it is reportedly intended to make Yahoo the place where people go to find personalized content in a similar way that people use Google for search. “Google will find links for content,” an anonymous source tells Swisher. “Yahoo will put the content right there.” Read more. Yahoo also picked up a company called Snip.it yesterday as Yahoo begins to hoard developer talent.

Advertising ‘Quant’-ified

AdWeek puts a human face to the influx of analytical talent to the marketing business, profiling one-time Wall Street analyst Ben Liang, who took a 30% pay cut to join agency land, and others like him. “They are drawn to advertising not just for the job prospects but also for the creative challenge,” says reporter Kristen Brown. There’s also the “Wild West” factor. “The horizon is limitless, and the rules are always changing.” Read more.

Inkling Of Channels Merging

Former Yahoo and Criteo-an Frank Weishaupt takes part in a Q&A on Boston Business Journal. Weishaupt, currently COO at mobile ad network Jumptap, tells BBJ’s Kyle Alspach that his company’s deal with WPP Group’s 24/7 is a “big” deal: “[24/7 has] big scale on the PC side, and we have big scale on the mobile side, and so we’re bringing those two things together. That will give customers the ability to control their messaging across both of those platforms, so they won’t have to buy PC from one person and mobile from another.” Read it. How long until the “mobile ad network” is a thing of the past -and it’s just a digital network?

Hulu Gets Ad-Blocked

Little more than a week after losing its CEO, video joint venture Hulu now has to contend with a Google Chrome browser plug-in that blocks ads from the streaming programming site, reports Mashable’s Chris Taylor. The free plug-in, No Hulu Ads, not only is the first ad blocker to ignore the video site’s plea that users disable such tools, “it’s also the first extension we’ve seen to call out an online TV service by name — one that increasingly relies on ad revenue,” writes Taylor. Read more.

Publishers’ Programmatic Problems

Citing Magna researcher Vincent Letang expectation that 43 percent of display advertising will be bought and sold via exchanges within the next five years, publishers are feeling the pressure to figure programmatic out before it gets any later. As Meredith Levien, CRO of Forbes, cited by Digiday’s Brian Morrissey, says: “Even the most successful premium publishers can’t go it alone when it comes to delivering individuals, because it’s not just individuals marketers want but individuals at scale. So unless you are a portal (and there are only a handful of those by my count), you should be taking ad exchanges as seriously as your ad buyers are.” Read the rest.

Measuring The Brand

Analytics firm Moat is licensing its tech to be provide more robust metrics addressing the efficacy of brand advertising. Glam Media says it will use Moat technology and explains how in a release, “Glam Content Analytics can help determine how much attention a user is paying to a particular piece of branded content and how that attention benchmarks against other campaigns.” Read more.

Facebook+

Over on Mediapost, Max Kalehoff waxes on the potential Facebook’s Graph Search holds for brand marketers. “Graph Search will create even richer Facebook consumer profile data. As Google has proven, search is among the most powerful databases of intentions. It would be quite a feat for Facebook Graph Search to near the success of Google.” Also quite a big “IF” More.

Earnings Season