Programmatic native ads are now available on the BrightRoll Exchange, opening up access for advertisers beyond Yahoo’s owned-and-operated properties.
“We’re offering all third-party RTB buyers access to native inventory,” said Tod Sacerdoti, Yahoo VP of display and video ad products, on stage at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference in New York City on Wednesday.
The upshot: Advertisers, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and agency trading desks will now be able to use an API to bid on native mobile inventory in third-party apps using Yahoo App Publishing. Gemini, Yahoo’s in-house native and search marketplace, will be the main supplier of inventory, although Yahoo is also in the process of onboarding other suppliers.
But native units on Yahoo O&O, including sites and apps, won’t be sold through the marketplace. You’ll only be able to get those through Gemini.
Keeping O&O separate from the wider pool of third-party inventory was a decision made with forethought, Sacerdoti said. Customers on the marketplace side of the business generally want to bring their own tech and data to the party.
“Previously, if you bought native with us, 100% of your media would be using Yahoo Gemini decisioning,” he said. “But here is a segment of the market that would like to use their own platforms and technology and we’re enabling that.”
Opening up native beyond Gemini and O&O is the “next step in the journey” of integrating BrightRoll’s programmatic offering into the broader core assets of Yahoo, Sacerdoti said.
Since the BrightRoll acquisition closed roughly a year ago, Sacerdoti’s team has been working on embedding Yahoo’s data assets into the BrightRoll DSP, onboarding Yahoo inventory into the BrightRoll marketplace and opening up the platform to third-party measurement vendors. In September, Yahoo consolidated all of its programmatic ad tech under the BrightRoll brand.
It’s evidence of Yahoo’s commitment to advertising, despite the tone and tenor of recent news coverage to the contrary, Sacerdoti said.
“Regardless of all the press, Yahoo is focused on driving engagement for consumers, particularly in mobile, and driving success for advertisers – because advertising dollars drive the success of Yahoo’s business,” he said. “I don’t think people realize how important and successful the native business as Yahoo is. We need to do a better job of communicating that.”
Although Yahoo doesn’t break out revenue numbers for native specifically, Sacerdoti did say it’s doing more than $100 million in gross media per quarter and growing more than 50% on an annual basis. In Q3, mobile, video, native and social – Yahoo’s so-called Mavens business – together increased year over year from $295 million to $422 million.
Native is a bright spot for Yahoo, although that hasn’t gotten much ink, Sacerdoti said.
“Most people think of Yahoo’s native business as essentially in-feed ads that appear on the home page of Yahoo,” he said. “What people may not realize is that Yahoo has embedded native advertising across every desktop property, across every mobile app and has actually started syndicating native ads to a large number of very large publishers across desktop and mobile.”
