• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 8, 2009

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz offered well-heeled investors, bankers and media executives a sampling of her sassy, straight-shooting style Tuesday at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York.

During a luncheon question-and-answer session with UBS analysts and attendees, Bartz covered a variety of topics ranging from the current ad market to Yahoo's search deal with Microsoft to the beneficial impact of Tiger Woods' travails on the Web portal's traffic. Here are some of the highlights from her remarks:

On display ad-pricing trends: "We're already seeing prices come back. It just stands to reason that as more people get in the market and want premium spaces, they will pay. Ad networks are good as long as the ad network is a quality network. We have the largest ad network through Right Media, and we have done a lot of work in the last quarter to make sure it's as high-quality as possible to pare out some of the low quality, like Russian brides [ads] and things like that."

Bartz also said that demand for premium advertising on Yahoo had started coming back strong in the last two quarters and was continuing to rebound in the current quarter.

On selling convergence of search and display advertising: "Convergence is, is there a multifaceted campaign for a marketer? When we look at going into a Procter & Gamble, for instance, we look at trying to figure out what they're trying to solve with their campaigns -- how much of it should be video-related, how much guaranteed-display ad, what should be local...how much is search...that to me is the idea of convergence, to have that holistic approach with the CMOs."

Bartz added that measuring results across different formats shouldn't be tricky because what matters in the end is increasing its sales through cross-platform campaigns. "What it means to us is revenue. What it means is 'don't leave any scrap of revenue on the table.' For instance, six months ago, our salespeople wouldn't quote mobile ... they're saying 'Is a mobile spot going to work and what do I do?' Now, they all quote mobile."

Search deal with Microsoft: "What we outsourced to Microsoft is basically the engine of search, which is the crawling of the Web ... all the experience on top of that will be a uniquely Yahoo experience. It will not look like Bing -- it won't even be close to Bing. Any additional work that we do to make the search results page organized differently, have video content ... to use our vertical search, our own vertical staff to add to it," Bartz said, will be done by Yahoo.

Competing with Google: "We're not going to match Google. We actually have our own RPS [revenue per search] goals. They have 70% share. We're not going to match what they have because of the long tail of content they have. We're misleading you if we say that. Are we going to focus on better revenue per search? Absolutely." In addition to consumers starting to buy again, improving RPS will depend on how well Yahoo delivers and targets search ads, said Bartz.

Tiger to the rescue: "God bless Tiger. This week we got a huge uplift. [Much laughter.] He got front page, news, sports, gossip. I mean, he just filters through the whole place." Asked if the media frenzy surrounding Woods would help Yahoo make the quarter, Bartz replied: "Absolutely. Better than Michael Jackson dying. Kind of hard to put an ad up next to a funeral." [Not so much laughter.]

Getting the kids excited about Yahoo: Asked how Yahoo can become the starting point for college-age users, Bartz said it doesn't need to be. "When a young sports fan wants to find out what happened with the team, they can't find that on Facebook...they go to Yahoo Sports. According to comScore, we have 78% reach in 12 through 26-year-olds."

While acknowledging that social networking is extremely important to young consumers, Bartz pointed out that the country's aging demographics favor its mass audience approach. "There's a lot of room for us to figure how to capture any audience were looking for and to monetize the one we have. This is not the problem I go to sleep worrying about or wake up worrying about."