Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Yahoo’s Pitch to Advertisers: We Sell Ginormous Ads

Another ad from Yahoo to people who buy ads on Yahoo: Look at all the great ads people have bought on Yahoo!

Before you snicker, bear in mind that Carol Bartz’s “B-“ aside, people are still buying a lot of ads on Yahoo (YHOO), at least when it comes to display ads, where the Internet giant dominates. JP Morgan (JPM) puts the company’s share of the U.S. market for display ads at 17 percent, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft (MSFT) at 11 percent and AOL (AOL) at seven percent.

Here’s a highlight reel of some of the more interesting inventory the company has sold in the last year. From the outside, at least, a lot of this stuff seems fairly similar to other big attention-getters that marketers are running on other Web sites. Apple’s (AAPL) inventive ads, for instance, are all over the Internet.

And lots of publishers are pushing oversize ads (and I bet that Web surfers will soon develop the ability to ignore those, just as they do with conventional banner ads).

Note that not everything here is a holy-cow-wouldya-lookit-that presentation, though. One of the highlights, for instance, is simply the addition of video to a search result for Charles Schwab (SCHW).

In any case, the clip works as a pretty good survey of Web advertising, and it’s reasonably short. Though if you’re not a huge fan of hairband guitar solos, you may want to turn the volume down.

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