The Top Ten Ads on Yahoo! in 2010

There has been a lot of talk about going beyond the banner in online advertising this year—and our Top Ten ads for 2010 show that not only are we moving beyond the banner, we’re also leaving behind the constraints of the Web page itself.

In our team’s picks for the best ads on Yahoo! this year, ads exploded from their niche on the side of the page. Bugs walked on to the Yahoo! front page, and the pages themselves folded, tore and crumpled. Banners turned into magazines and catalogs where people could buy stuff.
Entertainment ads made the best use of our canvas this year, but more traditional brands did great stuff, too.

Below are our top ten ads for 2010, in no particular order. (They’re all first place in awesomeness, though.)

Alice in Wonderland

This is the ad Carol Bartz mentions when she talks about the potential of advertising on the Web, and for good reason: People liked how the page opened up and pulled them down the rabbit hole so much that lots of them clicked on the ad four or five times. Is it advertisement or entertainment?

Nissan Qashqai

My wife literally gasped when I played this ad for her. The Nissan crossover dodging paintballs on the front page of Yahoo! France is cool enough. But press the play button marked “Voir la Suite” and the car seems to leap out of two-dimensional space, the front page transforms into something out of “Inception,” and the Qashqai zooms between buildings that used to be columns of text. My French is rusty, but I’m guessing “Voir la Suite” stands for “Blow your mind.”

Discovery: LIFE

Discovery wanted an online campaign as epic as its new series LIFE, and it got it with a front-page ad that had customizable wallpaper, video footage from the series, and a green bug that scurries around the “back” of the home page and into the ad. The results? People who saw the ads were 28% more likely to see the series than those who didn’t.

Drew Brees in Dove Men+Care

Not everyone loves Drew, but you had to love the way the Yahoo! Sports page opened like a shower curtain to see the New Orleans Saints quarterback singing the William Tell Overture (OK, the Lone Ranger theme in our house) at the top of his lungs. And other people loved it, too—the ad won the IAB Mixx Bronze Award for Rich Media Execution.

You Again

Not surprisingly, the new “mosaic” ad format we created for omg seems tailor-made for movies, and You Again is one of the best examples of it. Flashbulb pops replace celebrity photos with images from the ad. When the actresses tear pictures of each other in half, the ad tears itself in half, too. If that’s not enough, there’s a great faux behind-the-scenes catfight where Sigourney Weaver taunts Kristen Bell by saying “Avatar!”

Toyota Avalon

How do you reintroduce your luxury car model online? It helps to have a well-groomed man walk across the Yahoo! News page and invite viewers behind a curtain to look at it. Toyota piqued curiosity for its redesigned Avalon by showing that luxury awaited—if they only pulled the golden cord. In another example of great branding, Avalon also helped launch our new video series, Who Knew?

Discovery Shark Week

Discovery’s ad for Shark Week may have taken advantage the visual space of our Log-in Page ads just a little too well, judging by a handful of user complaints about the image of a soaked geek with shark teeth. But it also showed the cult appeal of Shark Week, and the lengths to which its fans will go to watch it.

TRON

TRON just managed to zip in before the end of the year—and we mean that literally. When the famous TRON lightcycle zooms out of the video screen on Yahoo! Movies and everything goes neon blue, you know you’re in the world of TRON. For another bonus, check out our video about the TRONification of Yahoo! Search.

Macy’s Memorial Day Circular

Advertising isn’t always for flash—sometimes, just sometimes, you want to sell stuff, too. Macy’s used our new pullover ad format in Yahoo! Mail to create a Web version of its Memorial Day circular that customers could flip through and use to order the items they wanted. And our Smart Ads technology helped serve up custom versions of the ads to people based on location, demographics and interest. The result was an ad that kept users around and engaged for a lot longer than a normal display ad.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

I’ve always had a thing for movie storybooks, which is why I loved the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 ad that seemed to have everything, including a book that lets you flip through images from the film. If they’d one of those when Star Wars came out, I could have saved my parents $4.95.
Are there any other ads that you liked this year? Let us know in the comments. And if you want to try something like this yourself, contact us. See you on the Top Ten in 2011!

By Jeff Sweat

Yahoo Makes Aggressive Pitch For TV Dollars, Releases New Mobile Units

Yahoo plans to release research Thursday supporting why traditional media buyers might want to pull time on broadcast TV to allocate budgets to mobile advertising. Supporting consumer behavior, the data accompanies the rollout of three rich media formats: Yahoo Mobile Screen Takeover, Yahoo Mobile Customized Expandable Ads, and iPad Tap to Video Ads.

Traditional advertisers who remove one or two TV ads from their mix will not notice any difference on the performance of that campaign if they allocate those funds toward mobile to find new audiences, according to Paul Cushman, senior director of mobile sales strategy at Yahoo. "A creative director who says he can't do anything with mobile is last year's story," he says. "HTML5 will become the major driver for scale and engagement within mobile. The ability for it to provide an app-like experience is significant and should not be underestimated."

Cushman, a mobile evangelist, says brands continue to waste ad dollars. The numbers revealing this trend sit behind Yahoo's firewall in mail and Front-Page data, Yahoo's "crown jewel," of which third-party companies can't gain access. The critical data suggests that consumers reach for their mobile devices while watching TV during a commercial break.

Yahoo supports between 49 million and 50 million unique mobile Internet users monthly. Commercial breaks during live TV events drive mobile Internet use, according to Cushman. Yahoo's analysis of consumer activity across the company's network found a correlation between TV commercial breaks and spikes in mobile Internet use. During commercials that ran with the 2010 Academy Awards, traffic and engagement on the Yahoo Mobile site increased on average 12%. Browser activity rose 125% on Yahoo News. Users consumed 39% more content on Yahoo Front Page, search rose 13%, and users checked and sent email 6% more.

Similarly, for the 2010 World Cup, traffic and engagement on the Yahoo Mobile site rose on average of 10% during commercials. Browsing activity rose 57% on Yahoo News, 24% more users consumed content on Yahoo Front Page, and search activity rose 12% on Yahoo Search.

Yahoo has offered the expandable ad format for more than a year, but customized the offering and began designing the other two formats during the past year to create a package for advertisers. Consumers are becoming more comfortable with mobile ads. Research from Yahoo Mobile and Nielsen suggests that the immediacy and portability of the mobile phone drives conversions. When consumers use their mobile phone to do research, about half the time they plan to make a purchase.

Yahoo isn't the only ad tech company capitalizing on mobile. Google also touted Wednesday high returns on investments for mobile ads on Google's network. Dai Pham, who supports Google mobile ads product marketing, writes in a blog post that Roy's restaurant managed to achieve click-though rates 539% higher on mobile than on desktop by investing in mobile-specific campaigns and hyperlocal advertising.

By Laurie Sullivan