Yahoo Launches First Ad Creative Platform, Princess Cruises Becomes Early Tester

Yahoo Advertising brought its expertise to this year’s Cannes Lions Festival, and on Wednesday announced its first data-driven creative solution based on dynamic insights from more than 205 million logged-in U.S. users.

Yahoo Creative, developed in partnership with Innervate -- which focuses on dynamic and interactive customer experiences -- integrates with Yahoo DSP, but also works with other ad platforms.

The platform took more than a year through concept to creation, testing it internally by producing close to 10,000 pieces in 2023, and then with about 20 brands, including Princess Cruises, which became an early adopter.

"We measured the impact of Yahoo creative against metrics such as lift in incremental search for our brand in the Yahoo ecosystem as well as site visitation to Princess.com," said Nick Charrow, director of media planning at Princess Cruises, adding that the key was a partner that could provide both impactful media solutions and creative solutions.

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Tony Gemma, vice president of Yahoo Creative, told Media Daily News from Cannes that the “industry talks a lot about bringing media and creative together and, frankly, creative tools have not kept up with the pace of change with programmatic.”

He said that by building creative closer to the DSP, Yahoo hopes brands can activate campaigns at the point of execution with media.

Princess Cruises became one of the first to run a campaign using the technology during the first quarter of 2024, driving both performance and brand awareness.

“It gave Princess Cruises the ability to create different versions,” Gemma said, adding that the programmatic campaign ran primarily display ads across several publishers.

Artificial intelligence (AI), which has become a companion to the design process and optimization of the ad, supports the ability to create multiple versions dynamically.

When asked how AI has changed the creative process, Gemma responded that in some areas AI has been very helpful.

If an auto manufacturer sent Yahoo a zoomed-in image of a car and they wanted designers to produce a large canvas ad with a background, in the past they would need to do it manually.

“It’s moved into an evolution of becoming a prompt engineer,” he said. “You’re prompting it to expand or adapt an image, but now with the prompts I can build a beautiful landscape behind it.”

The limitations and deficiencies of AI, for now, include its limited ability with images of faces and hands, so in that battle the artful eye of a designer, artistry wins.

Yahoo Creative supports omnichannel campaigns to work across connected television (CTV), mobile, display, digital-out-of-home (DOOH), and other media.  

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