Yahoo is going big at Cannes Lions for its 30th anniversary

Max Tani: It seems like you guys are gonna have a bigger presence than in other recent

recent years.

Rob Wilk: I’ll start maybe with the headline, which is, as of today, we have by far the most meetings, most speaking engagements, both, that we have ever had.

We are ready to go. We are fired up. In fact, I’m constantly trying to get in between two people who are trying to book the same space at the same time, which is like the best problem possible.

But you’ll see us on the beach this year. We have an incredible space… two stories… we’ve got events in the morning, panels during the day. And then we have some fun events at night, including our super signature event Wednesday night where we’ve got Diplo playing late into the night And there’s a couple of little surprises around that particular event that I can’t spoil.

But I think the difference to this year is we’re showing up with what I would describe as more substance than ever before.

If you walked around our office right now, there is a renewed sense of purpose and energy that a lot of people who’ve been here a long time are actively saying, “I don’t remember it ever being like this.” I’ve been back at Yahoo for almost a year. On June 28, it will be a year. So I’m getting close to my one year, and the amount that has happened in just that one year is sort of mind blowing.

So at Cannes, for us, we want to make sure that advertisers understand what is happening on our DSP side, we have a ton of momentum, a ton of new products that are built to make sure that advertisers get their best performance. One of our best stories of the year is our blueprint product, which is essentially an AI agent that helps you manage your programmatic buys, and it has the fastest adoption of any product or feature we’ve ever launched in our DSP.

Why this year? And what’s the story you’re going to be telling advertisers as your team is kind of fanning out across the week?

The difference between this year and last year is we went to market with just our DSP, and that is still a critical part of the company. It is a great product. We have incredible advertiser retention.

The difference from last year to this year is, in January, we reintroduced this idea of Yahoo ads. Yahoo ads is basically your direct source for any advertiser who wants to buy ads on Yahoo properties. Maybe that sounds a little bit backwards or maybe a little bit surprising, but under the ownership of Verizon, before Apollo acquired Yahoo, the majority of the focus was around building our DSP, we want to make sure that people understand that every single pixel on Yahoo properties over the last year have been rebuilt, modernized; every app, every single version of desktop and mobile completely revamped.

And on top of that, we’re making sure that the market understands the incredible mountain of first-party data that Yahoo is sitting on. I think that is one area that people maybe are not as aware of. So I just try to make it really simple for clients to understand. And we kept calling it this amazing trio of search, email, and content.

We still get 3 billion or so searches every month in our search engine, so we know when someone is looking for a car, looking for insurance, wants to take a trip overseas, we have that aggregated form of consumer desire. If you look at our Yahoo mail, again… We understand which brands people get emails from. We can see receipt data of someone just shopped at Walmart, at Amazon, online, offline. So we understand shopping behavior.

And then, of course, the easy stuff, which is, what do they read about? Are they sports lovers? Are they finance lovers? And the way that I try to describe it is, there’s only two other companies in the world that have all three of that trio. There’s lots that have one, some that have two. But this combination of search data, a consumer search engine, plus a consumer email address, an incredible portfolio of properties, It’s really just Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo audience.

Tease out a little bit for me the relationship between news brands. Because, as you mentioned, it’s unique being able to have email and search and these kinds of news brands, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Sports. Talk a little bit about how you sell that. Are you selling that whole package to advertisers?

And just to be clear, Max, I’m not doing it because I want to be a good guy. I’m doing it because it is a fundamental belief that I have.

I think about everything from “Do I believe our country is better off if they’re better educated?” Goddamn right I do. Well, I have three children, 20, 18, and 15, and I see their inability to discern real from fake. And it scares me to death. And then you look at how many of these amazing companies — that have been around a long time, that really believe in journalistic integrity — are struggling because they are ad-funded subscriptions. But the magic of the news business was to be able to balance subscriptions with advertising. And advertisers are, I would say, turning a corner.

Let me just start there. I really believe we’re turning a corner. I think for a long time it was a very blunt instrument. You either believed in news or you didn’t.

What I’m seeing now is advertisers saying, look, there is a difference between news that I know is well researched, done with integrity, versus clickbait. They are starting to discern between those two. And when you look at Yahoo News, the thing that I love about it, first of all, I just love the sheer scale of it. Here we get 190 million users reading Yahoo News every month. Huge, huge amount.

But if you look at Yahoo News, what I think we do super well, is the aggregation of all of these different news sources that we put together and then we actually use.

We acquired a company called Artifact... Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram. That was his new venture. We were able to basically plug in the Artifact engine into the massive audience that is Yahoo News, to do a level of aggregation that only AI can provide. When I look at our news site, I see perspectives from across the spectrum; it’s not hardcore left, and it’s not hardcore right. We really try to be as balanced as we possibly can be, and I see it in the product all the time. I’m hoping that that is a big part of the reason why people keep coming back to our news product, because I do believe that consumers are dying for something that just feels neutral and factual, doesn’t have some sort of agenda hidden behind.

Now, when it comes to advertisers, when I say I think we’re turning a corner, it is because the tools, like our DSP or any of the other DSPs out there, are getting better at understanding nuance. Max, I’ll use my favorite example. Sure advertisers can go into any of their DSPs, and they can choose to do keyword blocking, right? So I’ll use Caitlin Clark as my example. Caitlin Clark has a great game, and Yahoo News will write a story about, “Oh, Caitlyn had a great game. She shot, you know, 10 for 12 from the three point box.” But advertisers will have the word “shot” as one of their trigger words. And I understand the intention behind that. We all do, but you have advancements now that can understand the nuance to say this is about her “shooting” as a professional basketball player. And advertisers are starting to wake up to go, “Oh, number one, we need to be smarter about how we think about this.” And then you have some of the studies that are coming out from some of the big agencies and big holding companies that are saying, not only is news safe, but in fact, it provides incremental reach that you would not be able to get any other way. So you’ve got to start leaning into this notion that news and associating with news drives business results. It’s not just risk. There’s an actual reward here. Yes, advertisers are starting to lean in more and more.

Jim (Lanzone, Yahoo’s CEO,) said in an interview with Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, my colleague: “We’ve got the revenue model ripping, but we’re still early in what we think we can do here.” What’s he talking about here? What’s he alluding to?

He is alluding to our incredibly ambitious targets around growth. So on the DSP side — my favorite thing to say in the DSP is, it’s sort of a meme, it’s: “If you know, you know.” We’re going up against some very large, very formidable competitors, but when we do head-to-head tests, we win nine out of 10 times. So when you can, when you can back up your product with a statement like that, we should be growing our revenue incredibly fast.

On the Yahoo ads side — literally again, ads on our Yahoo properties — Jim is right. Revenue is doing well, but there are still a lot of advertisers that we have to win back again, that, over the years, you know, moved on, and I don’t blame them. I understand Yahoo has been through a lot.

So I’ll tie this all back together to say, “Why is Cannes so important?” It is so important because a lot of what Cannes is about is showing up with strength and giving advertisers confidence that we have the right team, we have the right products, we have the right tools available to make advertisers successful, and we want to make sure that they walk away from Cannes going, “You know what? I need to be spending more time with Yahoo.”

Post Liberation Day, April 2, have you seen any kind of major changes in the ad market? Are people pulling back on spending? What are you seeing?

It’s a great question. So funny, because if all I did was read headlines, I would be a lot more nervous than I am.

Let me tell you what I mean by that. You know this better than anybody: A scary headline gets clicks, right? What we’re actually seeing is not what I read about. So there were a couple of very surgical scenarios, and I’ll just say, the autos category is probably a good example: Advertisers were like, “Hey, we import a significant amount of steel and other items from China. We’re gonna actually cut our budget.” But that only happened in two or three very specific examples, and one of them, which I can’t mention, has now come back and turned it back on.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

What I do see, though, and there’s a nuance here, is that advertisers are not necessarily cutting budget, but they are giving out budget more conservatively. That’s a huge difference, like cutting a budget versus doling it out slowly and more cautiously. I spoke to the CEO of a major agency very recently, and one of the things he said was that he’s noticing — this is from an agency perspective — he’s noticing that clients are giving them shorter-term budgets. So let’s just say you give your agency, say, six months or nine months’ worth of budget, now they’re saying, “Here’s three months, and let’s talk again as we get closer.” So they’re being more conservative.

You guys announced a partnership with Netflix to help sell some of the streamers’ programmatic ad space. Talk about how that partnership came about —- who approached whom — and what distinguishes Yahoo from Netflix’s other programmatic partners?

This has been in the works for some time, as both parties were excited to make this supply available for all customers. The biggest takeaway for Yahoo DSP is continuing to provide our advertisers choice and control in how they execute their media buys, and that’s no different when it comes to supply access. We want to provide our customers with everything they need to execute their campaigns how it best fits their needs, and that includes access to premium CTV supply. Netflix is an obvious natural extension of that.