• by Ken Liebeskind , July 15, 2002

Rich media is hardly new to Yahoo, but today it becomes even more entrenched, with the Web's most popular site establishing contractual relationships with four rich media companies.

Yahoo is announcing the deals with EyeWonder, PointRoll, Unicast and Eyeblaster at the ANA/AAAA Marketing Conference in New York today. Originally, only the first three were planned, but Eyeblaster was added late last Friday.

All four have already run ads on Yahoo, but the partnerships change the situation for the better. "It makes it easier to do rich media with us," says David Riemer, Yahoo's VP of marketing solutions. "It was an arms length relationship and we didn't know the partners well. This is a much bigger commitment to make it happen in a big way."

In the past, he says, rich media was handled on a case-by-case basis, but will now be integrated into the sales channel.

Yahoo's 150 member sales team will be trained to sell the four rich media formats and sales revenue will be shared between the companies. Rates were not announced.

The use of Yahoo's sales force provides a big boost for the rich media companies. "You need a media company interfacing with advertising customers to create an efficient purchase process," says EyeWonder's CEO John Vincent. In the past, EyeWonder worked directly with the customers and their agencies and had a license with Yahoo to stream advertising there. "But Yahoo wasn't interfacing directly with the customer."

He says EyeWonder will have an employee working with Yahoo to arrange training sessions to help the Yahoo sales force learn more about EyeWonder.

Jules Gardner, CEO of PointRoll, says the partnership will benefit advertisers. "Yahoo will include our rich media as a no-cost option. If the advertiser buys media on Yahoo, they can use PointRoll at no extra charge," he says. "It creates added value for the advertiser."

Allie Savarino, senior VP for Unicast, says the deal will provide more inventory for Unicast. "There will be designated inventory instead of an advertiser coming and saying 'I want to run a campaign with 20 million impressions,'" she says. "It's very significant. Their team will sell it as a preferred ad unit."

Unicast doesn't sell Superstitials, but licenses more than 1000 sites to sell them. This agreement is similar to the ones it has with other sites, but differs in a major way. "The volume is unique to most other sites, there are few sites with Yahoo's traffic," Savarino says.

The fact that Yahoo is now a Unicast partner is "a wake up call to advertisers that the medium is capable of doing what other media does," she says. Speaking of other media, she says the deal will help the online industry win TV ad dollars. "The Superstitial is like a TV commercial, so we compete for TV dollars," she says, "and this deal will help us take money away from TV and bring it to the Internet."

EyeWonder also streams TV commercials and it was announced today that Coca-Cola would begin streaming EyeWonder TV ads on Yahoo! for the next two weeks to promote its Youth Partnership program. This is the first announcement of a new campaign in association with Yahoo's new partnership deals.