Yahoo! introduces AMP!, its new online Advertising Management Platform

Yahoo! officially presented today its new Advertising Management Platform, precisely named AMP!, a new online technology that – according to the Sunnyvale-based company – is going to overturn the way of thinking creating and managing online advertising. As stated in AMP! official press release, the purpose of AMP! is to “help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory – all from a single, integrated interface”.

This new platform will be a cross-selling advertising interface, aiming to transform and simplify every advertising business process. The innovation inside AMP is that it involves every actor of the online advertising market. AMP! will build an actual online-market, where advertisers as well as publishers, agencies and ad networks can operate in readiness, buying and selling advertising spaces, and/or testing ads on a network site; everything with a brand new and easy-to-use user interface. From the beginning, AMP! will be backed by its own network and by more than 600 U.S. newspapers in the Newspaper Consortium.

Yahoo! released this video demonstration of AMP!.

Personally, even if Yahoo! could seem following the philosophy of AdSense/AdWords, which gives to publishers and advertisers the right tools for managing theirs relationships, AMP! seems more comprehensive, focusing on every step of the online advertising relationship, from the purchase of a web-space to the display of a text link or a video ad. In addition, AMP! will offer the opportunity to target ads using behavioral, demographic or geographic options, and to select how much to pay and how, where and when an ads should be displayed.

Essentially AMP! could represent Yahoo!’s ace in the hole, in order to avoid Microsoft unsolicited offer. With AMP! Yahoo! wants to say “Hey Steve (Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO)! Forget the economic recession or stock market: we are here, still alive and kicking, and we are worth more than just 44 billion dollars!”.
At the same time, with this move Yahoo! is trying to persuade its investor to play its best cards yet. Even though Yahoo! does not seem at all interested in Microsoft’s offer, the official response to Steve Ballmer’s ultimatum clarifies that Yahoo! is “open to all alternatives that maximize stockholder value”.

Yahoo! AMP will be available from the third quarter of 2008; on my behalf, the future of Yahoo! without Microsoft would seem less dark than predicted; now its time to see if Yahoo!’s investors are the same mind.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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