Tag: Yahoo

Hulu Shuffles Ad-Supported TV Content To Yahoo

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Hulu is set to end its ad-supported TV service as it aims to push for paid subscriptions. The free-to-watch content will be distributed via Yahoo as part of an expanded deal it inked with Yahoo for the impending launch of streaming service Yahoo View, for which Yahoo will be using Hulu’s video player and running ads sold by Hulu’s sales team. Hulu, which recently added Time Warner as a minority shareholder, has amassed 12 million subscribers and launched a completely ad-free subscription tier last fall.

Why Brands Should Care
As viewers get increasingly accustomed to the ad-free experience that popular OTT services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video provide, it is understandable that Hulu is revising their content structure and focusing on building its paid subscription service instead. Soon, Hulu will most likely carry no ads in its SVOD service. (It will most likely still carry ads in its upcoming Live TV service.) But for advertisers, the ad inventory that Hulu provided will simply move to Yahoo’s new streaming service.

For more information on how brands can effectively reach consumers who are actively choosing to avoid ads, please check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Verizon To Acquire Yahoo’s Core Assets For $4.8 Billion

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Verizon announced on Monday morning that it has reached an agreement to acquire Yahoo’s core assets, primarily its internet business along with some real estate, for $4.8 billion in cash. Verizon says it plans to integrate Yahoo’s internet assets into AOL, which it acquired for $4.4 billion last year. Pending the usual regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close in Q1 2017.

Why Brands Should Care
Much like buying AOL, this Yahoo acquisition should give Verizon’s ad business a strong boost in terms of audience reach and user data. The online properties and user data that Yahoo brings complements the mobile properties and user data that Verizon already has, and the combined data pool should significantly increase the cross-platform targeting capability of Verizon’s ad operations, similarly to the way that buying AOL’s ad operations has. Granted, the operation likely won’t be able to truly challenge Google and Facebook’s dominant positions in the mobile advertising space. But by joining forces, it might emerge as a competitive rival that provides an alternative for brands to consider when it comes to digital advertising.

Source: Ad Exchange

Toyota Sponsors Yahoo’s Livestream Of The Stagecoach Music Festival

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Another brand has jumped on the live-stream bandwagon as Toyota announced it will be sponsoring the livestreams of the country music festival Stagecoach on Yahoo and Tumblr this weekend. The announcement came just one week after T-Mobile sponsored YouTube’s livestream of Coachella. As part of its campaign to promote the music content site “Music Moves You” that the company recently launched, Toyota says it is expecting the livestreams to reach “millions” over the weekend. The sponsorship includes Toyota branding at the top of the live-stream player’s page, as well as 30-second and shorter pre-roll video spots.

What Brands Need To Do
Livestreaming is starting to explode across digital channels with Facebook making a strong push for its Live video feature in the past few months, which creates new opportunities for brands seeking to engage with online audiences in real time. In fact, recent research from Brandlive shows that 44% of companies created live video content in 2015. Therefore, now is the time for brands to start exploring possible sponsorships with live-streaming platforms for events that may appeal to their target audiences.

 

Source: AdWeek

Yahoo Expands eSports Content With Mobile App

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Last month, Yahoo launched a dedicated eSports site to capitalize on the booming popularity of competitive gaming, Now, the company is expanding the content vertical to mobile with an Android app. In addition to the eSports coverage, stats, and commentary featured on its desktop site, the app will also use push notifications to deliver customizable alerts for breaking news in competitive gaming, tournament analysis, and the latest reports about your favorite teams or games.

What Brands Need To Do
With top eSports tournaments now drawing audiences that rival the biggest traditional sports events and popular live-streams routinely attracting more than 100,000 viewers, brands such as Coke, Intel, and Nissan have been sponsoring tournaments to get their names in front of the massive eSports audience. Now with Yahoo expanding its eSports site to mobile, brands will have one more mobile platform to reach video game fans, made up largely of the coveted demographic of young Millennial guys.

Source: TechCrunch

Yahoo Dives Deeper Into Live-Streaming With NHL Partnership

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Yahoo continues its push into live sports streaming as it inks a new partnership with the National Hockey League (NHL) to deliver live, out-of-market games for free. Starting today, hockey fans will be able to stream the NHL “Game of the Day” up to four days per week on Yahoo’s website. Yahoo will also provide additional content, “Best of the Day” and “Best of the Week,” to highlight top plays and postgame happenings during each of these games. The deal will last throughout the 2016-17 NHL regular season.

Market Impact
Yahoo’s bid for live-streaming sports started last fall, when it successfully drew 15.2 million total viewers with an exclusively live-streamed NFL game. With this new partnership, Yahoo is making NHL content more accessible, as it continues to chase the coveted millennial market whose viewing habits are increasingly transitioning to time-shifted viewing on Appified TV (to read more on this, check out our Outlook 2016 here). For NHL sponsors and brands advertising in NHL games, this deal should come as good news as they gain a digital channel that will help them reach online viewers.

 

Source: Variety

Yahoo Launches Dedicated Site For eSports

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Yahoo has launched a new dedicated eSports site to capitalize on the booming popularity of competitive gaming. The new site will cover live tournaments, statistics, interviews, and news in the digital gaming industry. In related news last month, Yahoo announced that it is shutting down several content verticals, including those dedicated to food, travel, health, and parenting topics, and choosing to instead focus on four of its popular content verticals – News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle.

What Brands Need To Do
Yahoo’s move mirrors ESPN’s decision earlier this year to launch a dedicated content portal for eSports, as both companies aim to leverage their experience with sports coverage and vast reach of sports fans into capturing the ballooning eSports audience. Previously, brands like Coca-Cola and Geico have been sponsoring eSports tournaments to reach the millions of fans those events draw. Now with Yahoo and ESPN on board, brands will have more platforms to reach the much-coveted demographic of Millennial guys.

 

Source: Variety

Best Of The Lab 2015: How To Create Branded Content That Works

Posted on by Lab Team

Welcome to the Lab’s year-end review, looking back at some of our best and most popular posts from 2015.

With the rise of ad-blockers, brand advertisers are increasingly turning away from online banners and looking into new ways to reach consumers. One great way to do so is through branded content. Throughout 2015, the Lab’s research team partnered up with Google and Yahoo to study the effectiveness of branded content on a global scale, to better understand consumer perceptions of branded video content, as well as how to use personalization to find the right audience for your brand content. Take a look at our findings:

IPG Lab + Google Release Deconstructing Branded Content: The Global Guide To What Works
IPG Lab + Google Present Blurred Lines: Creating Content That Works
IPG Lab + Yahoo: Giving Consumers The Personalization They Want

 

Yahoo Brings Full Bleed Autoplay Video Ads To Search

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In a bid for more digital ad dollars, Yahoo has started testing full-width, autoplaying video ads to its search pages. When users search for certain keywords that brands have bought Yahoo’s search ads for, Yahoo will place the brand’s video ads atop the search results. Fashion retailer Lands’ End is an early tester, and their video stretches the entire width of the webpage and plays automatically on mute. The test is limited to desktop only for now, and it remains unclear if or when Yahoo plans to officially roll out the ad product.

What Brands Need To Do
This is not the first time a search engine attempted to make a play at brands’ video ad dollars. In August, Google was also reported to be testing video ads on its search results pages. Video ads are popular among brand advertisers, and Yahoo’s new experiment may lead to an effective new ad experience that combines the expressiveness of video ads with the targeting capability of search ads. Brands, especially those with strong branded video content, should keep a close eye on this new ad unit’s development.

Source: AdAge

How Brands Can Make Use Of Tumblr’s New Messaging Feature

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Without much fanfare, Tumblr has rolled out a crucial feature that has been missing from its platform – private instant messaging. The microblogging platform has long offered an inbox feature for its users to ask and answer each other’s questions, but now it supports threaded one-on-one messaging as well. This new feature is available in Tumblr’s mobile apps on iOS and Android, as well as its desktop website.

What Brands Need To Do
Tumblr has been growing its platform as a content and social marketing channel following Yahoo’s billion-dollar acquisition in 2013, and some brands have gotten on board. Nescafé, for instance, opted to move its traditional website to Tumblr in hopes of “building stronger relationships with younger consumers” earlier this year. The existing Ask Inbox feature on Tumblr works great for repurposing those Q&As as user-generated branded content, and the addition of a messaging feature can help facilitate deeper communication between users and brands. For brands on Tumblr, this new chat tool should come in handy for customer relationship management.

 

Source: The Verge

Yahoo’s NFL Stream Proves Livestreaming Sports Is Still A Few Years Away

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Sunday, Yahoo livestreamed the NFL game it acquired for about $17 million by putting it on the homepage of its website and setting to autoplay. The livestream drew 15.2 million unique viewers overall, but only averaged 2.36 million viewers throughout the game, significantly less than what NFL games usually get on TV. While no major disruption or technical issue occurred during the game, Yahoo’s livestream received mixed reviews from the viewers, who took to Twitter to voice their dissatisfactions, mostly over the fact that they couldn’t watch it on TV.  

Market Impact
All things considered, Yahoo’s livestream of the Bills-Jaguars game is a well-executed experiment that the NFL tried in order to gauge the viability of broadcasting its content online. Judging by the largely mixed results, it looks like the ecosystem of sports watching – where many viewers still prefer to watch it on TV either in sports bars or at home – has yet to catch up with the TV industry’s shift towards OTT viewing. The average viewership number suggests that moving sports event online is still at least a few years away from reality.

 

Source: Re/Code