This week marks the first IAB UK Digital Upfronts, where some of the industry's biggest names pitch their wares ahead of the lucrative Xmas media trading season, and today is the turn of Yahoo which has unveiled its programmatic advertising platform Yahoo Ad Manager (YAM) Plus. 

Yahoo's Upfronts announcement follows yesterday's Facebook pitch, which primarily focused its "people centered marketing" and cross-screen targeting opportunities made possible through the recent launch of its Atlas ad server, and also comes aged of a Twitter event hosted later today, where it is due to present its "second screen service", Twitter Amplify.

The three key themes of Yahoo's UK Digital Upfronts pitch this year are programmatic, via way of its YAM platform, which is now available to UK advertisers, plus native ad units and content marketing opportunities made available through the combined Yahoo Audience Ads service and Tumblr.

Yahoo Ad Manager Plus

YAM Plus is the revamped programmatic media buying platform that lets advertisers buy Yahoo Audience Ads (including multiple creative formats) across a selection of its own properties (both desktop and mobile), plus those owned by third-parties. The service, essentially a revamped version of its earlier RMX platform, lets advertisers plan, execute and optimise complex display ad campaigns (including a data evaluation platform and cross channel analytics), and has been gradually rolled out since the start of the year.

Nick Hugh, Yahoo, head of advertising solutions, EMEA, explained to ExchangeWire the central tenets of YAM Plus which he feels differentiates it from rival single-stack offerings offered by other ad tech firms.

Firstly, he believes the fact that Yahoo has a "direct relationship" with its 800 million customers, means it is in a position to help with advertisers gain enhanced customer insights and campaign performance reporting, when booking campaigns through YAM Plus. This is made possible by the user data available on the Yahoo platform, which can then be used for improved targeting, according to Hugh.

He further explained that some of the inventory available via YAM Plus, can be accessed on other ad networks. But he also noted the data made available for targeting audiences on the network can only be available within the Yahoo platform. In addition, the more premium parts of Yahoo's owned inventory will be available exclusively via YAM.

Crucially, advertisers can also use YAM Plus to target users across screens, said High. This is made possible via Yahoo's ability to derive a mobile user's device ID, once they have logged into a Yahoo account from their smartphone or tablet. This can then be used to target users (anonymously) across screens via the campaign planning platform.

Improved transparency

Another key differentiator to YAM will be its improved transparency, according to Hugh. "Advertisers can now use it to see if they get an 'X%' uplift, compared to whatever KPI they want to achieve," he told ExchangeWire

At present Yahoo lets advertisers see what audiences they are buying, but up until now, Yahoo's service has lacked 100% transparency, when it comes to domain names. Although, he hastens to add that its services up until now has been "far from a blind network".

Hugh added "Depending on the performance goals, [the campaign reporting] has been slightly more skewed towards [what] audience [an advertiser has bought, not necessarily where their ad has appeared].

"As we shift to a self-serve model, we intend to move towards full transparency."

Responding to claims made in a recent Ad Age article asserting that Yahoo would demand a minimum spend of $10,000 per campaign in the US, Hugh neither confirmed, nor denied the claims.

Instead, he commented that: "All providers have minimum spend, and ours is in line with industry expectations... I'd say that a minimum spend of that size [$10,000] for a market like the US is actually pretty small."

'Single customer views' mount up amid a growing tide of 'mega stacks' 

The move shows Yahoo's hand in response to the rise of the single "mega stack", which has been a defining characteristic of the ad tech sector in 2014.

Earlier in the year Yahoo paid a publicly undisclosed fee for mobile analytics firm Flurry (although reports claim the fee ranged any where between $300m to $1bn), writing at the time Gareth Davies, AdBrain CEO, and ExchangeWire columnist, claimed: "In my view it’s the latest move in the ongoing war of the Silicon Valley giants to gain a ‘single customer view’ across screens as consumer media consumption segues from desktop, to mobile-first, and on into the ‘mobility era’."