Happy birthday, Yahoo.
The company, which was incorporated on March 2, 1995, turned 30 years old this month.
But a lot has changed since 1995, which was also the first year that ads ran on the Yahoo site. Today, Yahoo has a full suite of advertising and targeting solutions, the revenue side of which is overseen by Microsoft ad sales vet Rob Wilk.
Wilk, this week’s guest on AdExchanger Talks, joined Yahoo last year as global head of consumer sales and just three months later segued into the chief revenue officer role.
A big part of his job has been to build a new ad sales team centered on selling Yahoo’s inventory.
Under Verizon, Yahoo was very focused on its demand-side platform. The DSP is still a priority, but after private equity firm Apollo Global Management bought Verizon Media in 2021 and the company re-rebranded back to Yahoo, it became clear that there was a big opportunity to focus more on its core properties, Wilk says.
“That was the original reason for me coming to join,” he says, “to try and reinvigorate and remind advertisers about the power of Yahoo’s owned-and-operated properties.”
Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail are all big traffic drivers, according to Comscore, but a lot of advertisers are unaware of that fact, he says.
For example, in a recent meeting with a senior brand leader, Wilk was rattling off some stats and the client stopped him. “She’s like, ‘God, I feel the need to apologize here,’ and I said, ‘Why?’” Wilk says. “And her response was, ‘I’m in this business and these are things that I should know.’”
No need to apologize, Wilk told her. “We do, right? This is the reason we felt the need to relaunch Yahoo Ads and remind the industry of who we are and what we do,” he says.
“There’s a lot of competition out there, and if you’re not making it clear … what you do and what the value is, advertisers have lots of choices,” Wilk says. “Scale in isolation is just not that interesting anymore.”
Also in this episode: Yahoo’s relationship with The Trade Desk after their dustup last year over mislabeled video inventory, a deep dive on Yahoo Backstage (its answer to OpenPath, ClearLine and Activate), practical AI use cases for advertising and Wilk’s standup comedy experience. Plus: Make sure to stick around until the very end to hear Wilk’s rendition of the Yahoo yodel!
For more articles featuring Rob Wilk, click here.
