#MarketingExcellenceAwards PH 2021 spills: Yahoo on staying on top of the evolving adtech scene

Doritos products have always been a staple in the Philippines snack market and the brand was looking to broaden its appeal. At the top of its list, Doritos wanted to engage the next generation of consumers. When the pandemic hit, Filipinos were forced into a lengthy lockdown which eventually led to a rise in online activities, as people are faced with the struggle of being entertained when cooped at home. As the attention of online audiences was becoming increasingly challenging to capture, Doritos realised it needed an advertising campaign that would cut through the noise and reach people in a new and fresh way to create excitement and drive engagement.

Doritos decided to work with Yahoo to release the "Doritos AR Quest" campaign, impressing the judges and clinching the gold awards for Excellence in Advertising, Excellence in Experiential Marketing, Excellence in Interactive Marketing / AR & VR, Excellence in Marketing Innovation, Excellence in Performance Marketing, and bronze award for Excellence in Gamification at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Marketing Excellence Awards Philippines 2021.

Liu Meng Lye, Yahoo's business lead, told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that omnichannel campaigns and emerging channels such as DOOH are becoming more relevant in markets like the Phillipines. He also shared on how it plans to stay on top of the evolving adtech scene. 

This interview was done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners’ and finalists’ interview series for Marketing Excellence Awards Philippines 2021. To find out more about the awards click here.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What shifts have you noticed in the marketing space, and how are you helping brands leverage these?

Liu: Today’s consumers are going places. They’re heading outdoors but still maintain an online-first habit and are comfortable living most of their lives online. While they’re often shuttling between home, work, the store, and all points in between, they have their devices in tow and capturing their attention in a meaningful way wherever they are can be challenging for marketers. With so much fragmentation and so many distractions, it takes an omnichannel approach to get your message in front of consumers across multiple touchpoints seamlessly in their daily journey.

As consumer behaviour continues to evolve, we are helping brands leverage hybrid experiences and orchestrating campaigns across the purchase journey for their consumers, targeting audiences wherever they are and whatever device they’re on. Omnichannel campaigns and emerging channels such as DOOH are becoming more relevant.

Inherently omnichannel by design, Yahoo’s unified full ad tech stack provides a comprehensive suite of solutions that help marketers unlock various opportunities with omnichannel campaigns and make the most out of their spend. From having the very best targeting, audience insights and measurement, backed by first-party consent-based data, across various channels, all within a single platform, we help brands shape consumer experiences across the funnel while scaling with precision.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: Can you share with us an insight about today’s consumers that particularly stands out to you?

Liu: We witnessed a massive digitisation wave across Southeast Asia in the new normal — 40 million Internet users came online for the first time in the region in 2021, according to the report by Google, Bain & Company, and Temasek. Meanwhile, eCommerce spending increased exponentially in SEA, valued at US$120 billion in 2021, and is forecasted to see even more significant growth in 2025 at US$234 billion. It was an exciting development, and at Yahoo, we were focused on helping brands and agencies ride the wave, leverage this trend, and create value in this sphere.

A Yahoo survey found that 88% of consumers said they see the benefit of personalised ads, listing qualities such as utility and relevance as the top benefits.

It boils down to the right tactical strategy — reaching the right people at the right place and time with the right message supercharged through Yahoo’s suite of adtech solutions. A synergistic mix of various tools and formats can achieve highly cost-effective and impactful campaigns with impressive conversion metrics.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What developments are taking place for Yahoo in 2022?

Liu: In 2022, we’re committed to helping brands fully connect with their audiences — understand their specificities, and create more meaningful engagement through the right mix of channels and platforms. We are focused on creating more effective brand storytelling by going beyond the widest reach and diving deeper into nuanced profiles to strike a chord. We’re still guided by our mantra, “people-first, partnership-focused, and performance-driven”, as evidenced by the exciting ties and working relationships we’ve forged this year that strengthen Yahoo’s unified full-stack advertising platform so we can continue to stay ahead of the beat.

We’re already seeing strong momentum in 2022. Recently, we partnered with Marriott International on their Marriott Media Network, an omnichannel cross-platform advertising solution, enabling brand advertisers to deliver personalised and engaging experiences to Marriott’s audience. The network will feature premium inventory spanning Marriott’s owned channels including display, mobile, video, email and digital out-of-home (in-room television and digital screens). The partnership spans supply and demand with the Yahoo SSP as the exclusive access point and the Yahoo global sales team leading demand generation and sales, leveraging the Yahoo DSP.

This exclusive offering is just one of Yahoo’s strategic full-stack collaborations that highlight our ability to support both advertisers and publishers in unlocking the full value of their content, audiences, and marketing.

We’ve also recently announced our global partnership with Hivestack, integrating Yahoo’s omnichannel DSP into Hivestack’s SSP. The strategic partnership will bring together our industry-leading technologies, and enable premium, programmatic DOOH cross-channel media campaigns on a global scale.

Also, jumping off a successful partnership with leading privacy-led intelligence platform Near in Australia and New Zealand, we’ve expanded this collaboration across APAC to supercharge omnichannel campaigns and bridge the gap in online and offline targeting.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: Tell us a bit about the direction you are taking your plans with client/agency campaigns this year.

Liu: We have seen the immense potential of omnichannel campaigns to capture audiences who are beginning to resume some semblance of pre-pandemic life again, as they learn to live with the digital-first habits they’ve adopted in the past two years while interacting with the outside world.

There is a growing demand for hybrid and holistic touchpoints so that brands can connect with their consumers meaningfully, and Yahoo is set to further grow its DOOH presence and inventory across the region in 2022. As holistic omnichannel campaigns continue to be front and centre, we expect pDOOH to be a growing avenue, utilised within larger omni- or mixed-channel campaigns, for connecting with consumers across the conversion journey, with full-stack solutions addressing a host of emerging needs and demands.

As the cookieless race looms even closer, brands will need to find privacy-centric solutions to perfectly address their audiences whether an ID is present or when it is not. Yahoo’s suite of privacy-safe, identity-enhanced solutions includes Yahoo ConnectID which draws on first-party data from Yahoo’s wide database of users across our owned & operated platforms; and Next-Gen Solutions which builds on Yahoo ConnectID and leverages real-time signals, beyond content, to deliver relevant ad experiences in real-time and in a privacy-safe manner.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: As the adtech industry evolves rapidly, how is Yahoo helping clients and marketers keep up with these changes?

Liu: The only constant is change. Beyond preparing for the cookieless, omnichannel future, we’re also committed to helping marketers adapt faster to the changing digital ad landscape. Through our Yahoo Academy Learning Center, an on-demand learning platform, marketers can gain knowledge to advance their careers as digital marketers and build their confidence in making more informed omnichannel buying decisions. To keep up with the latest emerging and flourishing channels, we recently made available a short 30-minute course that helps marketers discover the benefits of Advanced TV and its growing value. We see this as a win-win for us as we put people first, both our own staff and those we work with, and partner with them to ensure they achieve the performance they desire. It’s all about making good campaigns great.

Our Yahoo APAC Growth Summit that recently concluded also helps our partners and the industry create the sparks and inspirations they need to win in our fast-evolving industry. This is just one of the touchpoints that we educate the industry on Yahoo’s latest developments and product innovations that will set the stage for the future.

The fast-changing ad tech world can be daunting for many, and we constantly seek to make these difficult topics simple, approachable, and understandable for everyone. We also recognise that it is difficult to be an expert in everything, so we build simple solutions that fuel audacious ambitions - powered by our unified ad tech stack. Our belief is simple, when we help our partners and clients win, we win.

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