With the recent news of Yahoo UK MD James Wildman’s departure followed just ten days later with the news of his successor Stuart Flint’s imminent defection to Microsoft, it’s been a rocky start to the year for Yahoo.

A Yahoo spokesperson said: “We are already in the process of recruiting a new country commercial director and managing director for our UK business and Stuart will stay on until the new colleague arrives and will ensure a smooth handover”.

The recent developments were preceded by the dismissal of Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro, who headed up its display ad business, with speculation indicating that his exit is largely the result of his failure to significantly raise the company’s advertising revenues.

However, despite the turmoil in its upper management echelons, Yahoo is preparing the roll out of its rebrand Yahoo Ad Exchange. ExchangeWire caught up with Nick Hugh, Yahoo’s VP and head of advertising solutions EMEA, to discuss the new offering.

Q: The biggest news to come out of Yahoo in terms of product launches this year seems to be the self-serve bidder you are bringing to market. Can you give some overview on it, specifically will it plug into external supply sources across desktop and mobile?

We are very excited to announce the launch of our new buying platform – Yahoo Ad Manager Plus. It will be an RTB buying platform that will be plugged into all the major supply sources, across desktop, mobile and video.

Yahoo Ad Manager Plus will also have access to premium up-front inventory as well as new and emerging formats across devices. Crucially, we will enable our data to be accessible through the platform, so any buyers using our platform will be able to leverage that data across all supply sources.

Our vision is to ensure that all of our core buyers are able to buy through any channel that fits their overall marketing strategy. They are able to buy through more traditional methods, but equally, we want to enable programmatic access to our inventory for them to buy any way they want – whether that is through open auctions, preferred deals or programmatic guaranteed.

In terms of service, yes, we are offering it on a self-serve basis, but we will also have differing levels of support on offer. A lot clearly depends on the resource levels our customers have in-house. For some, it will be fully self-serve, whilst for others expect a co-managed offer to be more suitable at the beginning, with a long-term plan to transition to a self-serve offer if appropriate.

Q: You also say that Yahoo data segments will be exclusively available for buyers? What differentiates Yahoo data? And how might it stack up against the other data-driven bidders (Amazon, AOL) making their way onto the market?

Yes, through Yahoo Ad Manager Plus we will make our data segments available to our buyers. What stands out about our data is its sheer scale and breadth. In the UK, we have a huge pool of 36,000,000 unique users. That data will be cross-device, specifically on mobile and targeting will be through logged in users, helping solve one of the biggest industry challenges of targeting cross-device.

The breadth of data is the other key point and in that sense we are not singularly focused on in-market or intent-based data. We have in-market data (part of which is search query data), transactional data, interest-based data, socio-demographic, browsing and registration data – which combined with the data of our third party partners, will represent a significant change to the way that data is used across the industry. In addition, by making it possible to bring an advertiser’s own data to the buying platform, we’re providing a unique opportunity to combine Yahoo’s data with first party data – creating new and unique targeting opportunities for programmatic buyers.

Finally, the other differentiator is more around inventory access – there will be some inventory that will only be accessible through our own platforms.

All combined, we are supremely excited by the opportunity this presents to our buyers and are looking forward to working with our customers to help drive more value through programmatic.

Q: You have decided to retire the (RightMedia Exchange) RMX brand and launch the Yahoo Ad Exchange? What's makes this different from its previous RMX incarnation, and how you will entice big publishers to use the solution?

Publishers who already benefit from RMX will continue to see value and improvements on Yahoo Ad Exchange. We are also developing incremental changes to attract new publishers and buyers. The changes are being implemented over the next few months and include:

1. Trust and transparency is important to us. All supply will be 100% transparent to the exchange, and fully verified as both safe and represented correctly at a domain level.
2. There will be significantly increased volumes of premium supply via new flagship publishers.
3. We are improving operational efficiency – a buyer can access any supply on the exchange in a safe and reliable fashion without having to go through a contractual process with each buyer. Sellers will be able to control all demand channels, and determine which buyers get access to their inventory and determine any preferred deals.
4. Yahoo will clear all transactions, so buyers can expect one invoice to cover media and platform fees, whilst publishers will receive one payment, from Yahoo directly.

Q: Is Yahoo Ad Exchange a premium solution to compete with the automated selling solutions that have dominated programmatic over the past three years?

Absolutely, but we will favour quality over volume. We offer the highest quality across display, mobile, video and native ads. It is a global ad marketplace, it will focus on providing sellers with much greater visibility and control over the advertising on their sites, efficiently connecting them to targeted advertiser demand and helping them manage user experience and maximise revenue.

Q: Will you make Yahoo inventory available through the exchange, and if you so who exactly will be allowed to buy these Yahoo impressions?

Our channel policies for Yahoo inventory will remain similar – we work with those buyers who represent differentiated and unique demand. Specifically, that means that we will continue to work very closely with our agencies, the agency trading desks and other players who represent new and unique demand to our business.

Q: I take it the Yahoo Ad Exchange (excluding Yahoo O&O inventory) will be open to all buyers?

Yes, subject to quality checks. We have a dedicated ‘Trust & Safety’ team who complement our automated processes to ensure the right level of quality and consistency for all of our demand in the exchange. The exchange will continue to be the platform on which sellers can transact with buyers, but ultimately the control will remain with buyers to determine which supply they are keen to access, with sellers ensuring they have the necessary controls to determine which buyers they want to transact with.

Q: There was also a lot of emphasis around the native proposition you are building at CES, can you give some overview on this? Will it be automated? Is there any way to buy this class of inventory from your agency bidder?

We have seen some great success with our native advertising proposition in the US - Yahoo Stream Ads, Yahoo Image Ads - with many advertisers enjoying the new benefits it offers to complement their existing display activity. Building on this success in the US, native ads will be coming to the Europe in the coming months, available on a self-serve basis through Yahoo Ad Manager Plus.