Text of Email to all Yahoos
Michael Arrington
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This email was sent by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker to all Yahoo employees today at 9:01 AM PST and has the details of who’s doing what in their new Advertiser & Publisher Group. Lots and lots of SVP and EVP promotions from the Yahoo ranks, and other peanut butter being spread around.
I want to do a summary of this email but it is so dense with corporate-speak that I can’t get more than three paragraphs in before I get distracted and/or zone out.
From: Sue Decker
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 9:01 AM
Subject: Update on APG OrganizationYahoos,
In December, Yahoo! announced the formation of the Advertiser & Publisher Group (APG), and today I am excited to provide more details with you about how we will be structured and the talented team that will lead APG.
The mission of the Advertiser & Publisher Group is to lead the transformation of how advertisers connect with their target consumers and businesses across the Internet, thereby driving more value for more advertisers and more publishers than any other company. We believe we have the right combination of assets to capitalize on the market opportunity and drive long-term strategic growth for Yahoo!. Our primary objectives in designing this organization are driving customer-centricity, maximizing accountability and facilitating fast, smart decision-making. To that end, we have organized APG around three key critical functions:
- Demand Channels: focused on providing marketing solutions to our advertising customers
- Supply Channels: focused on strategically selecting and serving our publishing customers
- Marketing Products: focused on matching every advertising offer from our demand channels to the best piece of advertising inventory from our supply channels, whether that is on Yahoo! or on one of our publishing partners’ sites.
Marketing Solutions (Demand Channels). Consistent with Yahoo!’s organizational focus on being customer-centric, we have chosen to organize our demand channels around two primary sets of advertisers: those who interact with us through a direct sales relationship (Direct Sales Channel) and those that interact with us primarily through a self-service online model (Online Channel).
The Direct Sales Channel will be led by Greg Coleman, EVP Global Sales, who will continue to manage our industry-leading direct Internet sales organization focused on delivering the most effective marketing solutions to our larger customers. Wenda Harris Millard and David Karnstedt will continue to report to Greg and lead Yahoo!’s direct sales organizations. Greg and his team will also continue to drive our international sales growth, working in tandem with the sales leadership in local markets. The sales operations team will largely remain in Greg’s organization as well, while we will be moving yield management and inventory optimization to a new group on which I’ll elaborate below.
The Online Channel will be led by Rich Riley, who has been promoted to SVP Online Channel & Small Business Services. Rich will lead this team in enhancing and delivering value to those businesses that interact with Yahoo! primarily through a self-service online model, whether they are looking for marketing solutions, publisher products or merchant solutions.
Yahoo! Publisher Network (Supply Channels). Our publishing customers are a critical component of the ad network ecosystem, and we are committed to driving and expanding monetization opportunities for this important customer segment. I have asked Hilary Schneider to lead the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) organization. I also want to thank David Karnstedt, who stepped in to lead this group while also leading direct search sales, and enhancing the overall connection and strategy of this group to be more aligned with advertising customer objectives. This team will be instrumental in developing and executing our global strategy of becoming the leading search, display and listings-based ad network by securing ad inventory on off-Yahoo! publisher sites. This off-Yahoo! inventory will complement the Yahoo! network inventory and enable our demand channels to offer our advertising customers not only the broadest array of marketing products but also the most robust and high quality audiences as well. As part of his responsibilities for the online channel, Rich Riley will drive the strategy around customer acquisition and retention of small publishers, supporting Hilary in this capacity.
Marketing Products Division (MPD). The Marketing Products Division is the “magic in the middle” that connects the two customer-centric functions described above. This division is responsible for developing the marketing products and ad marketplaces that will drive the greatest effectiveness for our advertising customers and the highest monetization for our publishing customers. MPD will achieve this by optimally connecting the marketing offers generated by the demand channels with the ad inventory generated by the Yahoo! network and YPN with speed and scale. We are currently searching for the head of this division. MPD is comprised of the following:
Search and Listings Marketplaces: Tim Cadogan has been promoted to SVP, Search and Listings Marketplaces and will be responsible for business and product strategy, marketplace design and matching, business operations and policy for several marketing products, including sponsored search, domain match and the submit family of listings products.
Display Marketplaces: Todd Teresi has been promoted to SVP, Display Marketplaces and will be responsible for business and product strategy, marketplace design and matching, business operations and policy for several marketing products, including display and content match. As the mission of MPD is to optimally connect offers to inventory, yield management and inventory optimization will move from Sales Ops into this team.
As we move toward a more centralized model for product management in order to drive our key objectives, two key organizations will support these two ad marketplaces teams:
Product Management: Mark Morrissey has been promoted to SVP of APG Product Management and will have global responsibility for the product requirements and prioritization of all advertiser and publisher marketing products, including sponsored search, domain match, content match, display advertising, advertiser applications, publisher applications, and mobile monetization. In the past, our products have been largely managed separately – search vs. display vs. listings, advertiser apps vs. publisher apps, small biz vs. YPNO. To align around super-serving our customers by creating more seamless experiences with our products and leveraging the breadth of our ad products, we are moving toward a much more centralized product management structure by adding display advertising, content match, and publisher applications to Mark’s current responsibilities.
Engineering: Qi Lu, EVP, Engineering will lead all engineering efforts for APG and will partner with Mark Morrissey in Product Management to ensure development and delivery of leading edge products. Qi continues to report to Zod with a dotted line into APG. In his new role leading the SDS-APG solutions team, Dev Patel heads the group that will continue its key role as the data solutions provider to APG, working with both engineering and product management.
Steve Mitgang and Lisa Morita have decided to leave the company to pursue new challenges. Steve’s existing product management and marketing teams and Lisa’s existing Customer and Content Solutions team have become part of key groups in the new APG organization. With Steve’s departure, all of product management (formerly under Steve) will now report to Mark Morrissey . Product marketing in Steve’s org will be organized with product strategy reporting to Tim and Todd in their respective product areas and channel marketing reporting to the demand/supply channels. With Lisa’s departure, Customer Solutions will report to Rich Riley and Tim Cadogan will lead Content and Product Policy, Product Quality and Analysis, Content Solutions and International CCS, on an interim basis. Steve and Lisa have been tremendous assets to the company, and I sincerely wish them both well in future endeavors.
In addition to the Demand and Supply channels and the Marketing Products division, APG includes the Local Markets & Commerce Division and Strategic Marketing and Major Initiatives.
Local Markets & Commerce Division (LMC, formerly Marketplaces). Hilary Schneider has been promoted to EVP of LMC and the publisher network. She will continue to run the Marketplaces businesses (Shopping, Travel, Autos, Real Estate, Local, Hot Jobs, Personals), which are being re-branded Local Markets & Commerce and, as discussed above, she will also oversee our publisher strategy. Hilary has extensive experience managing the operations of large publishing companies in both digital and print media, including Knight Ridder and Red Herring, and I am confident in her ability to lead and grow both the YPN and LMC organizations.
Second, I will look to hire a leader for Strategic Marketing & Major Initiatives. This person will work closely with various groups to pull together APG’s customer and market segmentation understanding, competitive benchmarks, and marketing and communications strategies. He or she will manage a small APG incubation team to generate ideas and implement plans for new segment-specific offerings.
Primary Support Functions
There are several key roles and teams that will serve in support functions to extend my capacity to manage this new and dynamic organization. I am happy to announce Jeff McCombs has been promoted to chief of staff for APG. Jeff and I have worked closely for almost two years on a variety of projects at Yahoo!, including most recently in his capacity as the finance lead for the eBay deal, Yahoo!’s initial foray into the graphical ad network business and he is already well-versed in the new APG organization and many of its priorities.
I’m also pleased to announce a new addition to Yahoo!, Mark Rubash, who will join Yahoo’s finance team as SVP of Operations Finance for APG. Mark will report to me until we identify and hire our new CFO and will partner with Rachel Glaser to cover all of the operating groups in the new structure (see separate email). David Windley is leading the HR function for APG. David joined us recently from Microsoft where he was the HR executive supporting the Chief Operating Officer. Mary Grant will head up the talented legal team supporting APG, and Mary’s experience during her tenure at YSM will be invaluable to this group.
As with any changes of this scale, we are evolving the organization over time. For example, we are still evaluating how we will organize for global delivery, including our U.S. based employees that help us deliver our products internationally. Additionally, to strengthen accountability and streamline decision-making, the UED team will transfer its reporting into one of the executives in the Marketing Products Division. Until the leader of this group is named, the team will continue to report through Larry Tesler.
Moving forward we are focused on finding the best ways to achieve our mission with speed and scale to deliver the best experience for all of our customers. Your leadership team will be facilitating the transition of the organizational changes outlined in this email in the coming weeks.
Please plan to join the APG all-hands today at 2 p.m. We invite all Burbank employees to attend in person at the Burbank Marriott. For those in other offices, you can access the live webcast from the front page of Backyard. If you would like to submit a question to be answered at this all-hands, please email question@yahoo-inc.com.
We have structured APG with the singular focus of driving more value for more advertisers and more publishers than any other company. I am incredibly excited by the opportunity ahead of us, the amazing assets we have to build upon, the ability of the APG leaders and their tremendously talented teams. Now, it’s game time! I look forward to all that we will accomplish together in 2007 and beyond.
Sue
February 15th, 2007 at 1:27 am
February 15th, 2007 at 6:28 am
February 15th, 2007 at 7:51 am
February 15th, 2007 at 9:53 am
February 15th, 2007 at 10:58 am