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Yahoo Gemini: Native Advertising on Small Devices

Didit Editorial

By Chris Bell & Steve Baldwin | March 4, 2014

On February 19, Yahoo’s Jay Rossiter  and Adam Cahan announced Gemini, a “unified marketplace for mobile search and native advertising.”

Rossiter wrote: “with Yahoo Gemini, advertisers get the performance and ease of search, combined with the scale and creativity of native advertising. By bringing the two together, advertisers can now buy, manage and optimize their mobile search and native ad spend in one place — driving greater performance and higher impact for their businesses and brands.” Ads on Gemini will be bought through the Yahoo Ad Manager.

Financial forecasts for native ads are bullish, with BIA/Kelsey predicting that “native ads” will add up to a $1.53 billion spend this year ($3.85 billion in 2016).  Yahoo has always counted itself among Native Advertiser’s boosters, and is already using the method on its Food and Tech sites. Putting native ads in front of Yahoo’s roughly 400 million users might stem one of Yahoo’s main problems: declining click prices (Search ad revenues declined 4 percent year over year in its most recent quarterly report; display ads declined by 6 percent).

At the same time, however, native advertising is a controversial method with many critics, including FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, who pointedly warned that “by presenting ads that resemble editorial content, an advertiser risks implying, deceptively, that the information comes from a non-biased source.” It remains to be seen how exactly Yahoo will implement the disclosure requirements incumbent on native advertisers to inform mobile users that the messages they see are sponsored, not purely editorial in nature.

Another question pertains to how the format of rewards-driven mobile ads will fit into Yahoo’s new model. Rewards-driven ads (a form of native advertising) reward viewers with content in exchange for viewing ads, using micro-currency systems. Mobile and Search seem to be on a collision course, and rewards driven mobile ads seems to be an upcoming format that’s poised to win.

One thing we can count on is that the mobile landscape will continue to change, and most of us will look to our industry leaders for guidance on how to navigate these new waters. The upcoming  ClickZ event has added an eMarketing Association bonus track focused on mobile. We would surmise that Gemini will be the hot topic – from changes, to strategy and beyond. We know we will be there, will you?

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