4 questions with Lem Lloyd

Lem Lloyd, vice president of Yahoo Corporate Partnerships’ Newspaper Consortium, talks about Yahoo’s new ad management platform, AMP.

What are some of the benefits AMP brings to the Newspaper Consortium and Yahoo?

AMP from Yahoo is the advertising management platform the newspapers will be receiving as part of their partnership with Yahoo. At this stage, there are hundreds of newspapers that will be using this platform exclusively to serve and traffic ads on their sites.

Among AMP’s strengths is its ability to target ads to specific audience groups based on their recent online behaviors. Consortium newspapers also will be able to leverage the Yahoo user base and its hundreds of behavioral targeting categories. So, in addition to selling an audience segment that is comprised of its own site users, Consortium members can include geo-specific Yahoo audiences to help increase the size of their advertising buys.

We have already opened up several behavioral targeting packages, including those focused on real estate, finance and travel, to a small group of newspapers and they are selling these packages at high rates and with great success.

The first set of newspapers will begin launching with the AMP platform in the latter half of this year.

How is AMP different from Google’s AdWords program?

AMP is a full ad management platform that includes inventory management and proposal creation for display advertising.

Yahoo is also providing the newspapers with several search products, including Web Search, as well as text-link ads.

Yahoo said AMP could replace a newspaper’s current ad management system. How would that work, and is offering newspaper production software now becoming a primary goal?

As part of the partnership, papers will be replacing their ad platforms with the AMP technology. This has always been part of the Consortium deal and we’ve worked very collaboratively with the newspaper companies to create a rollout plan that kicks off in the latter half of this year and continues through next year. Yahoo is dedicating teams of folks to helping the newspapers migrate their existing platforms to AMP.

How is Yahoo going to aggregate the ad inventory between all the various organizations and maintain privacy between newspapers?

AMP will allow individual newspapers and their parent companies to package inventory together from across the network. Such buys will always be at the discretion of the members, and each paper can choose to make portions of their inventory available at certain rates for inclusion in regional and national ad buys.

Each member will have its own private dashboard in which to manage its inventory, as well as to track ad campaign metrics.

One of the aspects of AMP that the newspapers tell us they’re excited about is the new ability to more easily package greater amounts of inventory together and, therefore, to increase their average revenue per ad order, especially in valuable targeting segments, such as finance and travel.