Yahoo will celebrate its 15th anniversary this year, but the once mighty web portal is now fighting for relevance amid competition from newer websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. To beat those competitors in the race for advertising dollars, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is hitting the streets to tout the company's data offerings.
Speaking at the 4A leadership conference in San Francisco, Bartz explained that Yahoo is sitting on a veritable goldmine of data that can be used to effectively target online advertising to the right audience, Mediaweek reports.
"We have so much data at our fingertips; we're drowning in data," Bartz said, and pointed to a recent Wal-Mart campaign as an example. The retailer wanted to reach moms online, and Yahoo showed it could reach 23 million mothers 5.6 times per month. As a result, seven out of 10 online moms see Wal-Mart messaging per month through Yahoo's network of websites.
Data acquisition is of course a hot button issue in the industry right now. Advertisers are clamoring for better targeting capabilities while simultaneously fighting with agencies and vendors over who actually owns campaign data. At the same time, government legislators are keeping a watchful eye on the interactive industry to protect consumer privacy.
