The roundup

Since Yahoo started in 1994, digital technology and data have disrupted a whole raft of industries and radically changed our daily lives.

At the Yahoo Upfront we explored how marketers and advertisers should navigate this changing landscape, and in this roundup we’ve collected the best opinions and insights from our speakers for you to take away and put into action.

Nigel ClarksonMD & Commercial Director, Yahoo UK

As we move through the digital age, the way we create and consume content has changed

“We’re moving from an era of distribution to an era of continued circulation. Individuals and brands are all sharing and creating content.”Nigel Clarkson, MD & Commercial Director, Yahoo UK

Everyone’s a content creator

“Technology has allowed the entry point to be so much lower. Previously there was a small group of people who created content that everyone else consumed and now everyone has the ability to be a producer of content.”Nick Petche, Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo UK

People have a lot more choice. They can choose content that’s tailored to them

“Now everybody has a voice – so there’s still a place for traditional media but there’s more to chose from. People can tailor what they watch so eventually they’ll just watch exactly what they want.”Alfie Deyes, Blogger, Pointlessblog

And we can get almost instant feedback on what we create...

“In the 90s I would phone in my stories, send my film to the office by courier and I’d get a copy of the newspaper in the post a week later. So you didn’t really know whether what you’d written had resonated. Now you can find out instantly.”Nick Petche, Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo UK

...thanks to data

“The data and insights we can now give you access to will blow your mind.”Emma Jowett, Director of Client Sales, Yahoo UK

...but there’s more change to come

“The disruption that data will provide to the advertising industry is really big. So big you should all be incredibly uncomfortable.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

Sometimes advertisers can feel like there’s more data than they know what to do with...

“We’ve measured 4.2 billion data touchpoints in the last 43 minutes.”Nigel Clarkson, MD & Commercial Director, Yahoo UK

...but that’s because we’re thinking about it the wrong way

“Advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about ‘who’ – who is their customer. But the assumption that it starts with ‘who’ is broken.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

We’ve built our businesses around a fabled customer who doesn’t exist

“We’ve always used demographics because we didn’t know ‘who’. But it doesn’t work in digital. The data revolution that’s coming is about finding the desired outcome and using data to work backwards.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

...it’s stopping us getting through to our audience as well as we could

“You lack authenticity because you lack context, you can’t really be yourselves because there is no one-on-one interaction going on.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

Native advertising is a step in the right direction

“A consumer viewing a native ad is 3x more likely to have the brand at front-of-mind and 60% more likely to say that the ad is high quality.” (IPSOS survey)

Dan Durling, Director of Agency Sales, Yahoo UK

There’s potential for data to be so much more individualised

“I don’t want to focus ads for a million customers. I want to be able to focus them not just for each person, but for each part of their personality.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

We know more than ever about the consumer

“Our users receive 22.8 billion emails every month. We can know where a user is flying to next week and whether they’ve already booked their hotel – and that information is incredibly powerful for brands.”Dora Michail, Senior Director, Programmatic & Audience Solutions, Yahoo EMEA

No matter where they are and whatever device they’re using

“Cross-device is on every marketer’s mind in 2016. Advertisers want to understand consumer behaviour from the moment they wake up and check their phones.”Emma Jowett, Director of Client Sales, Yahoo UK

“Cross-device user mapping is more important than ever. To be able to interact with a user wherever they are, whichever device they’re using should be the goal for marketing.”Dora Michail, Senior Director, Programmatic & Audience Solutions, Yahoo EMEA

But because we think we already know who our demographic is, we’re not paying attention

“Once you’ve decided that your audience is an 18–34 year-old male with a certain level of education and income, you’ve already lost all the advantages data can give you, because you’re constraining the system around a human problem.”

Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

Data is a real force to be reckoned with

“If you know hundreds of millions of things about your customer – something that’s beyond the brain’s capacity to understand, but you can use a machine to look at it and make sense of it – then you can find out some really cool things.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

And sometimes you get answers from a route you weren’t expecting

“Which socks people chose on a given morning is a 98% accurate predictor of the weather that day. Meteorological data on the other hand is only 90% accurate in predicting the weather.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

You have to let the machines do their thing

“So forget about who and start focussing on what: a machine doesn’t need to know who. I don’t tell the machine what’s interesting yet – I let it work that out.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

You need to start thinking about what the data tells you

“The biggest struggle is with agencies and brands – they always want to know who. But you can’t know who – the who will find you.”Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications Products, Yahoo

In the modern age users are seeking out what they want to read, watch and listen to

“Audiences want to engage emotionally with what’s in front of them. People want that honest, raw, emotional contact.”

Nick Petche, Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo UK

So create content that’s authentic and engaging...

“I turn down 98% of the brand opportunities I’m offered. The value of the relationship I have with fans is far greater than any relationship with a brand.” Alfie Deyes, Blogger, Pointlessblog

“The content I’m creating has to be better when I’m working with a brand than a video I could make on my own, otherwise there’s no point. I did some videos with Direct Line, where I learned to drive and used their safer driving device to improve my driving. The only reason I did that was because it had become a joke amongst my followers that I was 22 and I still couldn’t drive.” Alfie Deyes, Blogger, Pointlessblog

...and resonates with users...

“The most successful pieces of content in our Samsung campaign were actually the longer ones. If you focus on engagement and you’re authentic then people will watch more than 10 seconds.” Lawrence Dallaglio, OBE, Ex-England rugby world cup winner and founder of the Dallaglio foundation

...and we’ll make sure the right people find it.

“Our content offering generates millions of daily interactions. We create billions of data touchpoints every day. This, combined with our unique technology, makes it easier than ever to reach your audience when they’re most receptive.”Nigel Clarkson, MD & Commercial Director, Yahoo UK

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