Yahoo’s bloodletting on Wednesday also included a number of advertising and sales-related roles, AdExchanger has learned.
Yahoo is in the midst of executing a board-approved cost savings scheme that will see 15% of its workforce receive pink slips.
The layoffs, the first round of which went down last week, continued Wednesday with the announcement of Yahoo’s plan to shutter half of its content verticals, including Auto, Health, Food, Music and Tech. The company has said it will shed more than 300 jobs by April 18.
But it’s not just Yahoo’s media unit that’s getting scaled down. AdExchanger has learned that the most recent reduction was also felt across Yahoo’s advertising units, including the newly unified BrightRoll business.
While Yahoo declined to comment for this story, it’s likely that more than 30 ad-related posts were included in the most recent downsizing.
The cuts were felt across a wide range of marketing and sales functions, including ad platform sales, data-driven sales enablement, CPG vertical solutions, agency outreach and strategic account sales.
On the company’s Q4 earnings call in early February, CEO Marissa Mayer noted that programmatic would be a top priority for the company. She also said Yahoo’s global sales team “has been training and scaling from traditional premium-focused sales to performance and programmatic offerings.”
As part of that plan, Mayer noted that Yahoo is “streamlining our sales support and operations teams and simplifying our international organization to focus on fewer ad products.”
Wednesday’s layoffs appear to be a part of that streamlining. From Yahoo’s perspective, it would seem to be a priority for management to automate certain aspects of Yahoo ad sales that have been manual until now.
It’s also possible that some BrightRoll employees in particular, perhaps rather conveniently for Yahoo, are already or will soon likely be leaving of their own accord. Many employee stock options that accompanied Yahoo’s December 2014 acquisition of BrightRoll were scheduled to vest in Q1 2015. Some employees might sell their shares and get out of Dodge organically rather than wait for the ax to fall.
Yahoo provided this canned quote:
“In early February Yahoo shared a plan for the future. With this new plan came some very difficult decisions and changes to our business. As a result of these changes some jobs have been eliminated and those employees have been notified. We thank those employees for their outstanding service to Yahoo and will treat these employees with the respect and fairness they deserve.”
