Creative ad landscape and strategy in online advertising

Abstract

Over the years Online Advertising has been a thriving business. According to a recent market report, businesses and individuals had spent approximately $40 billion on online advertising in just the last year. Online advertising has evolved over the years from initial simple horizontal banner and pop-up ads to non-intrusive text based ads to highly interactive creative rich media ads. Display advertising in particular has seen tremendous growth in terms of formats and contents and is set to overtake other forms of internet advertising. IAB report quotes that $4.4 billion was spent by advertisers on display adverting just in first half of 2010.The latest buzz is though on developing creative rich media adverts which efficiently engages customer and delivers better user experience resulting in a greater awareness for a brand building exercise or successful sale for a direct response marketing. As more and more advertisers are looking for increasing the Return on Investment on their advertising budget, targeted advertising has gained huge momentum. Optimization of ads plays a key role in delivering the relevant ad in the right format to the right user. Yahoo! is a leading online consumer media destination, attracting more than 184 million U.S. unique visitors on a monthly basis. The company s owned-and-operated monetization includes display and rich media advertising across its portfolio of properties as well as paid search advertising on Yahoo! Search results pages. In this paper we have presented our observation about the online display advertising market and on how could Yahoo sustain its leadership in this space.