In a market like India that is really just starting to ramp up, you have certain marketers who are still focussing on traditional media and beginning to really think through how they can adopt the Internet. So, adoption is fairly low in this market and it is starting to see a pick up quite dramatically.
Greg Coleman’s 25-year career in media and publishing includes key executive roles in the industry’s leading traditional and online media organisations. Coleman currently serves as Executive Vice-President of Global Sales of Yahoo!, overseeing the sales organisations and sales products for Yahoo!’s global brand advertising and search marketing businesses. Coleman joined Yahoo! in 2001, and helped build and solidify the company’s recognised leadership in the online advertising marketplace. He also chairs Yahoo!’s internal Ad Council, which sets the company’s advertising policy and helps drive the overall strategic direction of Yahoo!’s advertising business.
Before joining Yahoo!, Coleman was Senior VP of Reader’s Digest Association and President of US Magazine Publishing. He has previously served as VP and Worldwide Publisher of Reader’s Digest, directing overall business for the magazine’s 48 editions, published in 19 languages. He also led the US-based Reader’s Digest to four consecutive years of record advertising revenues and profitability. Before joining Reader’s Digest, Coleman was founding publisher of ‘Memories’ magazine at Diamandis Communications. He also worked at CBS, Inc., where he spent 10 years as VP and National Sales Manager, leading advertising efforts for ‘Woman’s Day’.
Coleman holds a B.S. degree in Business Administration from Georgetown University and attended the MBA programme at New York University. Talking to exchange4media’s Jagadeesh Krishnamurthy, Coleman elaborates on the various aspects of online advertising. Excerpts:
Q. What has been Yahoo!’s experience in the Indian market?
Yahoo! is looking at the Indian market, which is becoming more and more technologically savvy, as a very important one for now as well as for the future. The Internet too is going to grow at a fast pace in the country. The statistics, which we have, reveal that over the last two years, the advertising for Yahoo! in this market has grown five times, and that is very explosive growth! I guess it will take another three years to grow five times again. Advertisers are beginning to realise and more formally understand how the time that people are spending online is a very good opportunity to reach their TG.
Q. Are Indian advertisers still wary about advertising online?
Some are. In a market like India that is really just starting to ramp up, you have certain marketers who are still focussing on traditional media and beginning to really think through how they can adopt the Internet. So, adoption is fairly low in this market and it is starting to see a pickup quite dramatically.
Q. How is the Panama ad system shaping up for Yahoo!?
It has been a tremendous success from every which way we looked at it and it took almost three years and several billion dollars to acquire different companies and putting up such a platform. Moreover, we are looking at a proper time to roll out Panama and the search technology in South Asian markets like India within the next year.
Q. What are the differentiating factors in Panama from other systems?
Panama was an enhancement that was implemented to give our advertisers tremendous flexibility and ease-of-use. The algorithms that we put into the search models were such that the more relevant the brand was, the higher it goes up on the search result. Previously, you could have any brand spend money and come up high on the search results, now only the relevant ads will come on top and thus it will bring in tremendous value to the users.
Q. Google has recently acquired DoubleClick. Is Yahoo! planning anything on similar lines?
We have all kinds of plans in that world, whether it’s in the world of ad-serving or ad-modelling, and when we are ready to unveil them we will talk to you at length about it. The market place is seeing the same thing in terms of what is needed for the next 10 years. So whether you buy something, build something or partner somebody, that’s how our attacking game will be.
Q. What is your view on video advertising?
It is not going to happen. Due to Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Google with YouTube, a lot of video content has begun to appear online. Finally, we are heading towards the point of critical mass. The big barrier we are facing today is on the creative front from the agencies. The video advertisements are not where they need to be. When I am watching a music video online, I don’t want to see a 30- or 60-sec ad. So what we believe is going to happen is that advertising will take place on video streaming and it will be much smarter. I don’t have the final answer, but you can imagine a series of five-sec ads that are interesting and creative. Everyone hates pop-ups. At Yahoo!, we made a conscious decision of not having any pop-ups as it is a terrible user-experience.
Q. What is your take on advertising on social networking sites? Do they really benefit the advertiser?
We are still in the early stages of monetising of social networking sites like Yahoo! Answers. Again, we need to be creative to introduce an ad model that users log in for creating communities and social networking. It’s definitely going to happen, as the numbers are quite big. We have now started monetising Yahoo! Groups, which has around 74 million users in the US. When everyone is talking about social networking sites, we have had Yahoo! Groups for 10 years now, which helps in building relationships among like-minded people.
Q. Finally, what is the next big thing from Yahoo!?
It will be mobile.
Q. Yahoo! has been facing a lot of competition from Google with their new features. What have been your efforts in curbing this?
Yes, we have a lot of respect for Google. It is still very early in the game and we have a lot of plans and thoughts. We have started it with search, which we have enhanced by creating Panama. One of the competitive advantages we have today is that we have two forms of advertising -- display and search. For us to be able to go to the market with both has become a tremendous advantage and we will continue to have it for the next couple of years when we will continue to move and enhance on that too. Business is taking place so fast that there will be breakthroughs in many different areas. We are also counting on the fact that Yahoo! will get the next big breakthrough in search. So, we have to look at this as a very long race.
Q. With the growth of penetration of the Internet, do you think that localised advertising will be the big next thing?
Local advertising will be the largest ad revenue source on the Internet in a decade. Presently, we have Yellow Pages, newspapers and other local advertising vehicles seeing business go on to the Internet. We have many deals around the world with several Yellow Pages companies where salesperson from the latter is selling a combination -- in the book and Yahoo! -- because the customers are demanding it. We have a number of resellers and sub-service channels that activate locally.