• by Tim McHale , July 30, 2003

Considered the "Leading Lady" of the Interactive media business, Wenda Harris Millard leads Yahoo!'s advertising sales efforts on Madison Avenue and across the country like few others within the business ever could. A well-known innovator in both traditional and interactive media, she has made her mark in the business by never forgetting that Madison Avenue is a business fundamentally based on relationships, between buyers and sellers. MediaPost recently asked Tim McHale to catch up with Harris Millard, to chat about the business and to see how she sees this new 21st century landscape shaping up, along with Yahoo!'s position within it.

McHale: To begin with, as everyone in this business understands, this is a tough business.

Harris Millard: (laughing) It is? I had no idea. Who said it was tough?

McHale: (laughing) I did!....

Harris Millard: You're right!

McHale: What's your secret? How do you consistently attract, motive and maintain the best and the brightest in the business?

Harris Millard: For me, it's always been about people. As you know, I have been doing this for 28 years, so you pick up things along the way. It has always been about people for me. My number one priority is whom I hire. The second priority is giving them the room, or creating the environment to succeed. I am a very hands-off manager in many respects, but that comes from hiring very high quality people and allowing them to do what it is that they do best. So I am here for guidance, but my job is big enough that I don't need to do anybody else's. A lot of that comes from respecting what they need to do and having them respect what I need to do.

McHale: To that point, some of the people you brought on, you've known for many years and so, "If you have a working relationship that works, why change it?"

Harris Millard: Sure. But I would say for the Yahoo assignment, I did not bring on people right away, whom I have worked with before. I was very pleasantly surprised that I made no executive changes at all within the sales organization for the first year that I was here. We have very, very strong sales management. We did make some changes in the sales organization but not at the management level. It was really only later that I brought on people that I'd worked with before, when we had opportunities to bring them on. But also because my career has been loaded with turn-arounds and start-ups, I do tend to travel in a pack.

McHale: How's it going?

Harris Millard: You can read for yourself! It's been an extraordinary couple of years. It's been loads and loads of fun. It's an amazing product to take to market and getting better all the time. We are very focused on continuingly improving this product. There's been tremendous focus on the product in the last couple of years, which has been very exciting. It's been great to take to market, something that has the power of this brand and from a sales standpoint, we're great! We are the leading Internet sales force by far, according to three different studies and we intend to stay that way. We'll do everything we can.

McHale: Would you talk about your sales strategy and how you view what you do and where you want to take Yahoo, not just in the next six months but in the next couple years.

Harris Millard: I think from a strategic standpoint, what has really made a big difference for us now - and will continue to make a big difference for us in the future, as far out as you can look - is that we have become a very customer-focused organization. By that I mean we have become real students of the individual businesses or business sectors that we work with. So we don't go to market and say, "Buy Yahoo, it's really big!" It's really about, "What do automotives manufacturers need from a marketing standpoint? What do they need from a media standpoint? What are they looking to achieve online?" Looking at every different sector that we focus on - there are about ten here - we've overlaid our regional organization with a vertical category strategy and management structure. We are very focused on what the objectives of those different sectors are, and then apply our ability to have them meet that. We are very solutions-oriented on a sector basis, so when we look at our strategy, that's the very first thing we talk about.

McHale: So you go in knowing the category?

Harris Millard: Knowing the category very well, but then moving on down from there. Knowing someone's individual business. I think that in years past Internet sellers were famous for not knowing anything really about their customer base, or knowing very little. And just sort of being, "It's about me. Buy my site. It's really good for my site!" It's no mean feat then to have become truly customer-oriented. It would be very easy for an organization the size of Yahoo to be channel focused. In other words, if we just went out and said "Well, I'm an expert in Yahoo Auto" or "I'm and expert in Yahoo Travel." But it's not about that. It's about, "What are you bringing to bear for your customers?" If you go to market with a sales channel strategy or a product channel strategy, you're really not serving your customers, because it assumes that automotive manufacturers don't need to run on another part of the Yahoo Network. Being able to leverage what we can do from a sales standpoint for advertising is very important. For example, for the pharmaceuticals sector, say we have someone who is trying to reach allergy sufferers. Well, if I were just an expert in Yahoo Health, I could go sell them the allergy site we have. But if I am an expert in what it is that they are really trying to accomplish, I know there are allergy sufferers all over Yahoo. Just being an expert in a channel is never going to allow you to leverage the opportunities that a site of our scale has, for any given sector or customer.

McHale: You are servicing marketers who are competing against each other. Every medium is, essentially. How does Yahoo keep two competitive players happy and apart?

Harris Millard: It's never been an issue. I mean, very often you have direct competitors, but you don't have the same sales person calling them. Part of that is by virtue of geographical location. For example, Coke and Pepsi wouldn't have the same people calling on them and that happens in many different industries.

McHale: Do you think an ad agency could learn something by how you're structuring and servicing your clients, based on how you see ad agencies working today? For example, you now have these media agency hubs, as part of the major agency holding companies, where essentially, the creative shops have become the satellites of the mega media shops...

Harris Millard: Right. I think that one of the challenges in that is, at an agency you become very expert about your particular client. Whereas, when you're at a media company or a consulting firm - because you don't have some of the strange restrictions that agencies have; where you're not really allowed to leverage all that you know on behalf of many customers - that's the point of the exercise when you're selling media. I can really help you! If you are a financial services provider, I have a lot of experience in helping financial service providers use this medium. You want to come to me 'cause I have lots of experience! Consulting firms are like that as well, but agencies are always prohibited from leveraging that experience, and you can't have any competing accounts. I've thought about this for a very long time and after watching the consolidation, I'm not sure that the old rule serves clients best. It may have once. I don't think that all this competitive bru-ha-ha that agencies go through is always warranted and I think in the changing landscape, where you have "5 families" controlling, it's an interesting thing to think about. I'm sure there are many things we can learn from each other...

McHale: What we're hearing in talking to our friends at the major media agencies is that the biggest problem with global media agencies today is competitive conflicts. Even when marketers raise their hand and say, "I want to talk to you," media agencies respond with, "We can't talk to you." And so in some ways, this breeds not intransigence, but stagnation. Because the marketer is now limited by the people that they can talk to.

Harris Millard: And I think that's very much to my point. I think it's a big problem, because in order to leverage the expertise that some groups or individuals have, you end up having incredible agency churn from a people standpoint. People have to leave and go to another agency if they've had the fast-food experience, but they couldn't get ahead where they were. I think the old rules probably need to be re-looked at and clients need to think about service firms like consultancies or law firms.

McHale: Looking quickly back, how are your first generation renewals doing? The first mega-deals that Yahoo did in the late 90's? Some of them must surely be coming up for renewal.

Harris Millard: Oh, we call them legacy deals. I don't know how much we need to talk about those here. That's something we talk about with analysts and we're on the record with all that information... I think what might be interesting to know though is that when you look back a couple of years ago at where our business was coming from at Yahoo, it was a kind of a cowboy list, our top 200 were not the global 1000's. And if you look at it now, we have the same advertiser list as any major publication like Time magazine or Vanity Fair. Now when you really look at that list of our top 200 advertisers, that's a very encouraging list.

McHale: Where do you see the interactive ad market expanding in the next couple of years?

Harris Millard: Well, I think that there's no question in my mind that the industry will soon be experiencing a tipping point. I think 2003 is turning out to be a great year certainly for Yahoo, but last year was also a phenomenal year for Yahoo from an advertising standpoint. This year we have said we are seeing the same, in terms of continuing to attract those traditional brand advertisers. I think it's a very solid year for everyone in the Internet business. I think you're going to see more and more marketers understand that, the Internet is not going away...as a matter of fact it's probably more important than ever. I'm continuing to see a genuine interest in learning how to use this medium.

McHale: We've seen big announcements from Coca-Cola and McDonald's increasing their share of the media mix with interactive. Yahoo must be hearing and seeing that in other categories as well. Without mentioning any marketers, what are the categories where you've seen the positive growth in the last 12 months?

Harris Millard: I would say that there are two that are outstanding. One is the automotive industry, which has been a great growth area for almost everybody. We've been a beneficiary of both Detroit and the import auto companies, acknowledging that this medium is really built for potential car buyers. It is so perfect. I think the latest JD Powers study said it was 88 or 90% of all new car purchasers go to the Internet for their research. That's a stunning number. These companies are dealing with facts and there are facts aplenty that make this medium worthy of significant marketing dollars. For us, it's not only about generating leads for auto manufacturers, although that is a big part of what we do. They have also come in the last 12 months to use the Yahoo front page for product launches, as the size of the audience on the front page has great appeal to them, so product launching and lead generation have been the primary drivers in that sector.

McHale: And beside automotive do you have another category?

Harris Millard: Entertainment. I think entertainment companies for a while weren't quite sure what to do with the medium. Boy, do they know what to do with it now! Beginning Thursdays and certainly on Fridays, people go to find out what to see this weekend, so again, the Front Page of Yahoo has become a "must buy" for the movie studios. Our entertainment business has been a huge growth factor for us and they are using the medium very well. They're using it to show trailers to go deep into the cast, the show times and for purchasing tickets. It's the medium of choice to really know what you're about to see and learn more about it.

McHale: You mention 2 categories, one is a long purchase funnel process and the other one is, "Hey, let's go out tonight."

Harris Millard: Another one is CPG.

McHale: We've talked a lot about CRM in the last 3 years. Do you see marketers in these categories or other categories using online data intelligently?

Harris Millard: It's been a number of years now that "who owns the data is king." If you go back a while, to GM's involvement with EDS or Procter and Gamble, they know it's about data. We're seeing lots of companies say, "Okay, I have all the data, but there's no intelligence." There's no data intelligence, there's no real application for the data. Where is the application for that data? Where does it take you? I think a number of major marketers have done a brilliant job. Pepsi, of course. Also, Purina is among the most sophisticated packaged goods companies out there. The Internet gives these big marketers the opportunity to really get inside and get consumer insight, which is really what they're looking for. This medium is head and shoulders above any other. You're not going to get consumer insight from television. You're not going to get consumer insight from outdoor. That is the great strength of this medium.

McHale: How does the value of the data affect the pricing of deals of consequence?

Harris Millard: When you're talking about a major investor, for them, it's all about the overall value proposition. When we're doing significant business with companies like those, we're not sitting there niggling about the price. Where you have pricing issues is when people are doing little deals, little pieces of business and an agency is paid to get you down on price.

This interview will be continued in tomorrow's MediaDailyNews.