• by Shankar Gupta , February 8, 2007

Yahoo next week will host an advertising "infront"--its answer to the lavish "upfront" presentations hosted by major TV networks, Yahoo's chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard said at an industry conference Wednesday.

Millard said the idea of traditional media companies dictating how interactive ads are bought and sold "keeps her up at night," and that Yahoo's "infront" is an effort to educate traditional ad buyers about what they're getting for their interactive dollars.

"The digital marketing industry is barely a dozen years old and we still need some time to define our value and to help marketers and their agencies understand what digital has to offer," she said at the Digital Hollywood conference in New York. "As long as people who have experience in other media are going to begin to buy digital, the idea is to help them understand what they're buying, and what happens when they do buy."

Harris added that she was worried that online media will become commoditized. "As traditional media companies bundle their digital assets, our industry will be reduced to prices," she said. "Our precious fledgling industry is a commodity before we're ever even born."

Since online media properties don't have a limited amount of ad space they can sell, Millard said, Yahoo's infront will be more about educating advertisers about what's possible, rather than selling the fall season. "The TV upfront is all about the scarcity of inventory, with two sides debating how scarce it is. The digital space, theoretically, has unlimited inventory," she said. "So there's no false seasonality to digital. We're doing new things all the time, as opposed to TV, which is still geared around the fall season for the most part. That's one of the points we want to get across."