Well, they said it would launch in Q3, and it has – yesterday Yahoo! unveiled its new ad management platform, called APT, at a razzamatazz-filled event in New York introduced by John Hamm, star of Mad Men (currently the topic of much debate in our house as to its merits).
APT started life as “Project APEX”, which Jerry Yang started to talk about around a year ago as a successor/complement to Panama (Yahoo’s search ad platform, properly known as Yahoo Search Marketing). Yahoo then pre-announced something called AMP! (Ad Management Platform) in March, saying that it would revolutionize the way that ad media was bought and sold, drastically simplifying the selling process for publishers in particular. And yesterday AMP!’s name had changed again, to APT. APT does not appear to stand for anything, but at least they have dropped the exclamation point.
So what is APT? Well, according to Yahoo, it’s “designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online while connecting all the market players — publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers — from a unified platform to do business more efficiently and effectively”.
However, in its first incarnation, APT is principally a tool for publishers, aiming to make it easier for them to respond to advertiser/agency RFPs, and allowing them to build ad hoc private networks in order to be able to re-sell other publishers’ inventory. This latter capability is strongly linked to the initial user base for AMP, which is Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium [PDF] members. The Newspaper Consortium is a sort of hybrid advertising and content network. Two members of this network – the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News – are founding customers of APT.
APT for publishers
According to the blurb on the APT site, APT will bring the following benefits for publishers:
- Simplified workflow (creative management, campaign management)
- Analytics & yield optimization (inventory management & prediction)
- Increased inventory liquidity through cross-selling abilities and integration with Right Media Exchange
- Extensibility via web services & an API
- Access to Yahoo!’s expertise (creative development, targeting, etc)
The only screenshot available is of the APT dashboard, which looks fairly nice, but doesn’t reveal that much about the functionality of the system (click the image to view it full-size):
There are also some more tidbits in the video which Yahoo release in April during the original AMP announcement.
Of the announced functionality, the ‘cross-selling’ capabilities in APT are some of the most interesting, representing a twist on the network model. Rather than running a traditional network where the publisher members give a certain portion of their inventory to a centrally managed hub, with APT, publishers can buy and sell inventory directly to and from one another. This will likely mean that publishers can get a better price for that inventory than if they sold it at remnant prices. If APT does a good job of this, it will make publishers’ lives much easier, and deliver a much-needed fillip to their revenues.
SImilarly, APT – by integrating with Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange (RMX) – could attract networks to work with Yahoo/RMX by offering a new pool of inventory that those networks could resell.
What about advertisers and agencies?
Where APT’s value is less clear to me is as a tool for advertisers and agencies. APT will provide a one-stop-shop for buying inventory on Yahoo’s properties and those of its publisher partners (i.e. the Newspaper Consortium folks) – and, given Yahoo’s strength in behavioral targeting, should be able to offer innovative inventory packages and highly targeted buying. But do advertisers and agencies need another interface for buying ads? These organizations would prefer to buy their media through the third-party ad server solutions (DoubleClick and Atlas, mostly) that they already use. Already they face fragmentation in their buying systems for search, contextual, display and rich media advertising – another tool may add to the pain, not ease it.
This may seem like a biased comment (since Atlas is now part of Microsoft), but in fact Microsoft faces the same kinds of challenge as we evolve our advertising platform. Our adCenter product offers a web UI for buying advertising (mostly search and contextual, with display coming), but larger advertisers prefer to interact with it indirectly through its APIs. And this – rather than a ‘one-stop-shop’ buying UI – is how I think APT will end up interacting with advertisers and agencies. Sensibly, Yahoo seems to have appreciated this, since a big part of its APT story is its extensibility through third-party integration.
in conclusion, if APT can create a more transparent network buying experience, and at the same time enable publishers to gain more control over how their inventory is sold, then it will definitely be a Good Thing for the industry – and for Yahoo, as it looks to position itself against Google and Microsoft. It’s going to be interesting to see how APT develops.