As of September 1, Verizon Media is now officially … Yahoo. Was that on anyone’s 2021 bingo card?
Guess everything old is new again – with a twist. This week on AdExchanger Talks, we catch up with Iván Markman, who joined Verizon Media in early 2019 as chief business officer and now fills the same role at the newly constituted Yahoo.
There’s no denying that Yahoo’s path has been full of twists and turns, and that the assets nested under the former Verizon Media umbrella have undergone a vast amount of change in a short amount of time – and provided some of the earliest evidence that the great ambition of telcos to use their data to become big players in digital advertising would remain an unrealized aspiration.
Private equity firm Apollo Global Management’s recent purchase of Verizon’s ad tech and media assets for $5 billion is only the next chapter for Yahoo Take 2.
And now that Yahoo has been freed from the scrutiny of the public market as part of Verizon, the company will be able to move faster, think more strategically and build richer relationships with advertisers and partners, Markman says.
“We’ve turned the business back to growth and we have been accelerating growth,” he says. “There is so much potential to go deeper and be bolder.”
Also in this episode: What attracted former Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone to the job as chief exec of the new Yahoo (he starts September 27); morale at Yahoo; Apollo’s plan to “aggressively” focus on commerce, content and sports betting; Yahoo tries its hand at NFTs … and Markman indulges in a Yahoo yodel.
