Ed Meyer, Yahoo director?

Either I haven't been paying attention, or none of us have, because I just noticed that Ed Meyer is listed as one of Carl Icahn's prospective board members of Yahoo. Ed Meyer, as in the head of Grey for six gazillion years (OK, it was really 36 years). Interesting that this part of the Yahoo battle sort of pits former MacManus Group chief Roy Bostock (Yahoo's chairman), against the former head of Grey. And you thought this was all about Carl Icahn vs. Jerry Yang. In other news, allegedly Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo's search business and take a minority a stake in the company. Makes sense to me.

Saul Hansell's thoughts on Yahoo

Finally got a chance today to check out Saul Hansell's "Bits" blog over at Nytimes.com to see what he had to say about the IAB conference. Read this excellent post, "Wishing for the old yodel from Yahoo"—it's a good summation of why Yahoo finds itself where it is today, and includes a nice tip of the hat to Wenda Harris Millard, who, Hansell notes "was unceremoniously pushed aside in a power struggle with Yahoo’s search advertising department." I've long believed that Yahoo didn't know what it had in her—an executive who could truly bridge both sides of the traditional/non-traditional divide—and I think Hansell agrees.

Yahoo wants to open it up

At a time like this, you have to give props to Jerry Yang just for showing up at the IAB conference. But as far as really addressing Microsoft’s attempt at an acquisition, well, of course, he didn’t. (To that extent, it seemed like he and Microsoft senior vp Brian McAndrews, who appeared later in the day, were reading from the same playbook, both using almost precisely the same wording to describe how they couldn’t really add anything to what’s already been out there. Maybe they're closer in world view than we thought.) After IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg gamely asked about the Microsoft deal, Yang, and Susan Decker, who was added to the agenda late (as Jerry’s bodyguard?) discussed what they saw as the Next Big Thing Yahoo should pursue having finally completed its search reinvention, Project Panama, last year. What they came up with isn’t exactly nothing you've heard before, but here you go: a sort of uber-advertising network which would let advertisers buy inventory across multiple sites beyond what is available today, and would allow publishers to package inventory (both their own and others) across a using a streamlined, standardized platform that would take a lot of friction out of the industry. But here’s the problem: from what I could tell from other conference attendees, no one in the industry seems to be buying what Yahoo’s selling. During a later panel moderated by Federated Media founder/"Search" author/super blogger John Battelle, the panelists were openly derisive of Yahoo’s idea. Here are some quotes:

From Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media and Advertising, "Run your own business well before you start running someone else's business."

Lauren Weiner, senior vp, Meredith Digital Media was down on losing the insight and control of inventory has across its own sites: "We lose that advantage when we start representing other properties."

From Don Friedman, exec vp/CMO of Computer Associates (who spends 30 percent of his budget in digital): "It's not going to be as clean as they play it out to be."

Whether Yang and Decker caught wind of this, I don't know. After their talk was over, they went quickly backstage; one intrepid reporter I talked to, who tried to get back there, wasn't even allowed to breath the same air as Yang, things being what they are.

The Yahoo bashing continued during the many conversations I had over drinks later in the day. What I can’t get my head around is this: this is an industry in which new standards are always being invented, and, although it would be lovely if one platform could dominate (probably Google search comes as close as anything to a frictionless transaction market in online), it’s hard to see how this would happen. Sometimes I think it would be especially great for agencies who still have trouble figuring out how to make money off of this business. Making planning and buying not so time-consuming would help. However, if it truly is a great idea, Microsoft and Google would surely build their own, and the industry, instead of being streamlined, might end up right where it started. The upside is that even in its hobbled state, Yahoo still is much more of a powerhouse in display advertising than either Microsoft or Google, but in the current, down-on-Yahoo environment it still doesn’t necessarily seem positioned to rewrite the rules of the marketplace.

Yahoo ad sales defections continue

The defection of members of the Yahoo advertising group took a double-dip today: both Jerry Shereshewsky, who had perhaps the world's oddest title (Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Madison Avenue) and Steve Mitgang, who most recently held the title, senior vp, advertising platforms and products, are both taking CEO posts elsewhere in the Internet universe. As was Wenda Harris Millard, who recently left for Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Jerry, was truly the public face of Yahoo, at least in the advertising industry. It was pretty hard to attend an Internet advertising event over the last five years or so, and not see Jerry there. He's taking the helm at grandparents.com—an idea whose time has come—where he'll no doubt continue in that role. As for Mitgang, he was deeply involved with Project Panama—Yahoo's revamp of its search advertising platform, and he'll be taking the reins at Veoh, one of the emerging players in the Internet video industry. (Dmitry Shapiro, the passionate founder of Veoh, CEO will continue on as chief innovation officer.) To get back to the Yahoo angle, it's hardly a shock to see Shereshewsky leaving. In a sense, Yahoo is going back to the future, trading in Terry Semel for Jerry Yang, who founded the company and, its relationships with advertisers and agencies having been solidified, focusing more on the tech-heavy side of online advertising. As for Mitgang, it's a little tougher to see, since the overriding goal of the ad revenue side of Yahoo's business is to wed search with display, and search seems to be the coin of the realm in Santa Clara these days. On the other hand, I'm just someone sitting in her home office trying to read a few tea leaves.