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
It’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Time. Where you at? Where you at?
Here’s a kooky ideas, let’s do some big re-org but in actuality make the teams more crazy. Now that we’re at the Internet stage where we’re going past the awkward years, who’s going to take pole position? What are your thoughts that Yahoo’s gotten so big they started a skunkworks in SF with Caterina Fake?
Yet Another Huh? Oooo. Omnimonetization!
Can someone summarize that email in like 4-5 lines? The “It’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Time” from Alaska Miller didn’t quite do it for me.
I’m still reading the damn thing.
Time to update cogmap. Y! seems to have the highest revision # of any company on there.
It amazes me when I see this kind of corporatization (not sure if this is a word) happening in a company. How long do you think it took to write that? I bet she wrote it herself…probably cost a couple of $Gs just to do that. And these companies wonder why the entrepreneurs leave and they can’t come up with consistent innovation…too much time writing emails
@Palak: They had a team of 50 MBAs think it up. 40 interns write it. 30 lawyers to review it. 20 executives to sign off on it. And then Decker just used her email address to send it.
damn – I gave up trying to make sense of it after the second paragraph.
Sounds like a robot wrote it, for robots.
-Zaid
APG is just ONE unit within the massive Yahoo reorg committed last Fall. This is in conjunction with Project Panama and incorporates a lot of elements from Overture as well as consolidating other groups.
In terms of relevance, the entire point of the APG group is to feed money into Mother Yahoo. APG will be going directly head to head with GOOG and MSFT battling over for such things as CPM, CPC, and service contracts.
This is just a tombstone letter telling people about spring house cleaning.
YPN is a great paying ad service compared to Google AdSense, too bad they’re entirely too strict when trying to get into it.
“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.”
That about sums up the “content” in that email. It is all in there – “super-serving customers” “seamless” “leveraging” and of course the dreaded “centralized”.
Yahoos, it is time to polish that resume. You are being run by a f**king corporate-speak bean-counter (oh, the horror). At this point, you guys would be better off at IBM Global Services, writing mainframe COBOL code – and that is saying something. The way I figure, at least you will have a job in a couple of years.
That email should have TOTALLY been sent entirely in Zlango!
http://www.tech...est-12-million/
Maybe that’s Zlango’s enterprise licensing model right there. Give life to internal corporate messages through brightly-coloured emoticons!
How did you get the email? Isnt this suppossed to be confidential email (there may be some content announced in public but none of the emails are supposed to be seen by public).?
You’ve all got it wrong. They used Corporate Jargon Generator software to write the memo. They just ran something like this program at
http://www.andr...mpanyname=Yahoo!
and mixed in a few names of Yahoo! senior managers, and it was done. No muss, no fuss.
Velioncho,
It’s a company wide email. It’s expected that it will get leaked.
My god, who would have the patience to read all that ? If you can’t get your point across more concisely, you probably need to go back to the drawing board. WTF yahoo ?
Longest email of all time?
Velioncho – I’ve installed a small program on Yahoo’s main servers that automatically routes a copy of all emails sent by execs to me.
I wonder if they’ll hand out exams to find out if any of the staff actually read or understood any of the email.
amazingly wrong, just so – backwards. Yahoo! is still top heavy.
- They might do better to put a hi-atus on buying anything,for the next 12 months do nothing but work on inner works
- They need to have a lower manager to people ratio. LOL take a trip to google although Im starting to feel we will being hearing more on them soon.
-RB
Michael Arrington Velioncho – I’ve installed a small program on Yahoo’s main servers that automatically routes a copy of all emails sent by execs to me.
You’re also providing a service to employees using Yahoo Mail and can’t get to their accounts.
In any large corporation, sending a company-wide email is actually a much more efficient method of making information public than it is to issue a press release.
/tongue out of cheek
Does anyone know off hand what portion of Google’s advertising revenue comes though their Adsense program?
It seems to me Google is getting too fat of the advertising market, somebody needs to get a real chunk of the adsense portion of it. I often read posts on webmaster forums from people complaining about being rejected or making lousy revenue off of the adsense program… but there is little in the way of real alternatives. Small players like AdBrite exist but don’t have the depth of advertising clients to get very relevant ads up, even if they did have algorithms as good as Google’s to do so.
YPN as I gather is quite limited only because it’s still in beta. Hopefully it will gain some traction when they start to hype it.
Holy crap am I glad I don’t work at Yahoo. I’d get fired in days if you need this high an attention span.
Check out these beauties … take a deep breath, some serious Apple Pie and Peanut Butter are coming …
“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.”
Just for fun, try using “customer-centricity” in a sentence tomorrow and report back what kind of look you get in response.
I suppose they reserved a lot of time for staff to enable the staff to go through the e-mail from start to finish.
Mike – I know it is company wide email, leaked to public easily but it gets leaked in sort of unofficial way. In our company, each of the company-wide emails have a signature saying it is violation sharing company information with others. And here I see you ctrl+v’ing the whole thing here, that is why I got bit surprised.
As a ex-Yahoo! employee, a sigh of relief that I don’t have to memorize yet another 3-letter acronym (APG?), keep track of yet another level of vice presidency (EVP, SVP, PVP, AVP….), and have to remember that its all about “customer-centricity” (as opposed to what? just caring about being promoted, and getting noticed for brilliant musings in executive meetings?)
it looks like standard fluff – as well as their so-called new, innovative advertising plan
the executive summary of this would be: generic nonsense and a list of lead promotions
Er, putting their customers first is NEW?
BTW, thanks mike. I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep. This should do it – though it might give me nightmares.
Wow, a lot of you people must have never worked at a larger corporation.
Emails like this are common, this is how top level execs get information down the chain. Yes, many of you would fall asleep reading this, but the 1st line, 2nd lines, 3rd lines managers needs this information to give guidance to their teams. Emails like this are sent to all employees but is mostly meant for the people who need to understand the new direction of the corporation.
I read the email, dense it is, but it still structured well and follows suit to what was announced earlier this year. If you ask me (and the share price) their aligning themselves to try and take full advantage of Panama.
definitely bland corporate speak.
on the other hand, institutions have been accumulating the stock in 07 anticipating a big run up later this year.
signifiant insider buy made last week as well.
do your own dd.
I want to work for her. Geesh.
Oh no. Just when I thought I got that dose of peanut butter out of my system, here they go again with long drawn out emails like this. I wonder what the teams working on del.icio.us, flickr, pipes, and related 2.0 apps in the YHOO portfolio think about emails like this.
Right-click > Send to Junk Mail
yes we get these emails about once every two months. yes its blah blah, the writer knows it, the readers know what, whatever.
don’t get too worked up about the high number of middle managers mentioned…in reality they have little to no power and act primarily as messengers…either communicating orders down or communicating progress up. i reckon “real” decision making power at yahoo is in the hands of about ten people.
George P., well said. I’m not sure what the whole point of this blog post was other than to continue to Yahoo-bash which seems to be more “in” these days than it is to use such corp-speak phrases as customer-centricity.
On one hand, critics decry Yahoo’s actions of late, yet on the other hand, when serious attempts are being made to improve the landscape *and* try to communicate those changes down the ranks, those efforts are ridiculed.
Lastly, is nothing sacred to a Yahoo employee? Is it a damn race to see who could be the first to forward a company confidential email to an A-lister? Big woop! Get to work!
@ yongfook – thats freckin’ hilarious. haha.
Yahoo people, stop checking TC and get back to work. You are been watched!!
ummmm. yeah. did you get the memo? we’re going to need yhoo to come in on sunday and work on those tps reports. might as well also add a piece of “customer centricity” flair to yhoor flickr badges too while your at it!
Mike just FYI, ur blog was kind of getting hang effect while page was loaded. is this bcos of so many videos u have ?
They probably want to copy adbrite’s dashboard.
What kind of immature post is this? What did you expect? She’s not a geek…she’s a former wall-street senior level executive who is trying to do her job.
I think it is quite immature that Mike and the rest of you are focusing on her choice of business saavy language rather than trying to get her message. She is not being paid for her communication style…and that is not what Yahoo wants from her. This is like laughing at a foreign professor who knows what she is doing but doesn’t know how to speak in the local tongue, aka, “simple non-business tongue.” I work at a start-up, and no, no one sends out emails like this…but so what? We also cannot hire brilliant women like this yet. I always read for the *message* in whatever email I get.
I am sure internally they are trying to find ways to turn the company’s recent horrible and embarrassing wall-street performance around. This is their attempt…you don’t like it? Then comment on that.
If you cannot figure out what the email is saying then try reading it slowly till you understand it. No one cares that you “zone out” trying to read it.
the world is bad enough; can you spare us the corporate emails and sum it up for us. Sure would be nice, not like eveyone on this list hasn’t had to read tons of this kinda crap already.
Still trying to comprehend the message…
Colin – Sorry. I’ll try harder and read it again.
Nope. Gave up again.
yongfook, totally agree.. Someone should come up with a program that translates this stuff automatically info zhango. Then how about making it a toolbar extension for outlook, and selling it to enterprises using slogans such as “eliminates communication inefficiencies within daily corporate channels”
Zlango could turn “eliminates communication inefficiencies within daily corporate channels” into a single icon, saving so much space.
Mike you make me laugh with your last comments. I must say that I gave up big time with this email. The thing is that, many people would have had mails like this in the past (and maybe still do now).
Mike, you sure must have, with your background and possible legal jargons in your previous jobs.
But I think now, with web 2.0, no one has that time and patience to read a long (and I must say, boring) email like this. Just summarize your points; go straight to the issue. Sorry Colin, we have all given up. Sue is web 1.0.
Mike you are a lawyer man. Are you kidding me? This is what you are built for…long boring documents that go on and on about things that can be summarized in one paragraph. At least you have a sense of humor about your ridiculousness