We have come a long way since modern advertising began to take shape with the advent of newspapers and magazines centuries ago. Digitalization has revolutionized the way businesses advertise their offerings, moving billions of advertising dollars to social platforms, websites, retail media properties, and various online mediums with large user bases.
Advances in technology have led to the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence as a means to study and analyze customer behavior and predict their future habits. Modern advertising companies use this data to reach their potential customers, combining the power of predictive data with attention-grabbing, ready-to-use ad formats that are customizable and straightforward to apply.
We at Insights Success came across one such company, Yieldmo. Yieldmo is a digital advertising technology company that increases the value of advertising inventory for buyers and sellers. It offers various products designed to drive optimal media performance to deliver high-quality ad impressions.
At the helm of Yieldmo is Mike Yavonditte, a private investor in the technology industry with investments in over 100 internet companies. He is the Founder and CEO of Yieldmo, where he has created a work culture that deeply cares about human-centered design principles to build bestin-class ad formats.
We got into a conversation with Mike to understand how the company is reimagining digital ads and preparing for the next massive shift.
Let’s take a deep dive into Yieldmo’s journey till now.
A Concise Run-Through
The mission of Yieldmo is to provide a Smart Exchange that maximizes the value of advertising for buyers, sellers, and consumers.
Yieldmo operates a Smart Exchange that differentiates and enhances the value of addressable and non-addressable ad inventory. It helps publishers monetize more efficiently and effectively, and unlock value for clients.
Yieldmo creates, measures, models, and curates campaigns for increased scale and performance as a leader in contextual analytics, real-time technology, and digital formats. By understanding how each unique impression behaves and looking for patterns and performance in real-time, the company drives real performance gains without relying on audience data.
The Best of the Best
What sets Yieldmo apart from its competition is its technology and data. It combines privacy-compliant datasets with machine learning optimization, frictionless formats, and high-quality inventory to deliver higher performance for its advertisers. Its proprietary technology uses dozens of privacy-compliant signals on billions of impressions to create intelligently curated deals.
Over the last 2+ years across many different environments, Yieldmo has demonstrated that these curated campaigns outperform advertisers’ existing media strategies. As a result of these efforts, smart marketers who leverage Yieldmo have seen vast improvement, as 100% of all curated campaigns deliver lift. On average, Yieldmo’s proprietary technology lifts campaign KPIs 75% and over 80% on a cost- adjusted basis.
Yieldmo is making the advertising ecosystem better and more transparent by empowering all stakeholders to make educated decisions based on data. It is not biased to any one player in the ecosystem and never prioritizes one group at the expense of another.
The company helps advertisers unlock value from all of its products, matching inventory to the goals of their campaigns and delivering outstanding results, and helps publishers monetize their addressable and non-addressable ad inventory.
The Reimagination of Digital Ads
Yieldmo was founded at the beginning of mobile advertising when most companies were simply repurposing their display creative and trying to make it fit on a mobile screen. It realized early on that this was a bad user experience and set out to create a better one by diving deep into the area of creative design and development.
Mike wanted to make mobile, and ultimately all advertising, better through formats, technology, and data. By combining formats, real-time infrastructure, and advanced analytics, Yieldmo delivers a better overall ad experience.
Today, Yieldmo has 16 patents: seven focus on data and measurement and nine focused on creative formats and function. Its visually stunning and page-enhancing ad formats understand user behavior such as scroll direction and other granular page details, feed the signals into machine learning models, and optimize the campaign in real-time.
Earlier this year, the company rolled out https://yieldmo.com/yieldmo-frictionless-formats-high-impact-meets-programmatic-scale/, which are ready to use, require no extra work or creative lead time, are transacted through Native or Video pipes, and are DSP hosted. Yieldmo has also recently introduced CineClip, a 100% exclusive new form of video inventory that renders whenever there’s an opportunity. CineClip drives incremental revenue on any page with complete flexibility for Publishers and allows Advertisers to reveal their story with cinematic flair in a friendly, easily digestible, 100% viewable format.
An Embedded Creative Culture
At the core of Yieldmo’s cultural DNA is creative exploration and a commitment to unlock the potential that sits within each and every Yieldmate. It believes in providing full autonomy for work to be done and for problems and solutions to be debated productively and healthily.
Employees are empowered to think through new ways of evolving the business and their role in making an impact. At Yieldmo, employees’ career paths are in their hands, and its leadership team genuinely cares about employees as people and puts great responsibility on the role of leading others. As a people-driven organization, Yieldmo is honored to be included on https://www.crainsnewyork.com/employers/new-yorks-best-places-work-2021 list multiple years in a row.
The Vast Impact of the Pandemic
Mike states that the advertising market was greatly affected by user behavior and how online habits changed during COVID-19. According to https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/opinion/covid-19-causes-digital-consumption-to-rise-by-over-30-forming-new-and-lasting-consumer-habits/en-gb/4209, digital consumption rose by over 30% during the pandemic, forming lasting consumer habits in shopping and content consumption. One area greatly influenced by the pandemic is Connected TV. According to Mike, with consumers stuck at home, high-quality video became more important than ever. As video continues to grow and evolve, Yieldmo believes that all video will need to be platform-agnostic, and it has increased its video offerings and is continuing to evolve for a seamless experience to meet this demand.
Another area that was significantly influenced was online shopping and the rise of Direct-to-Consumer advertising. According to https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/coronavirus-impact-online-retail/, online retail sales increased 32.4% year over year in 2020 and were up 39% in Q1 of 2021. With the value of online retail rising, Yieldmo focused innovation on shoppable ad formats, such as https://yieldmo.com/introducing-megashopper-new-video-format/, that help more closely connect advertising and shopping experiences.
Helping Hand to the Community
Yieldmo continues to contribute to the community in numerous ways. It has worked with the https://www.theboydinitiative.com/ and The Advertising Club of New York’s https://www.theadvertisingclub.org/foundation/ad-futures/ to mentor future leaders for careers in advertising technology. Yieldmo has also donated media to help raise awareness for important initiatives, such as the https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/ and https://media-saving-lives.com/, to name a few.
A Future View-Through
Mike states that digital advertising is on the brink of a seismic shift. The future browser and legislative changes restricting personal user targeting tactics make it harder for marketers to connect the data about individuals and how they move across the web.
“We are rapidly moving toward a ‘Privacy-First’ economy: smart marketers are starting to test new privacy-compliant ways of expanding reach, finding efficiency, and communicating, without relying on 3rd party cookies.”
Yieldmo’s solutions were built with the future of advertising in mind. To help marketers capitalize on these shifts as they take place, such as Apple’s curtailing of online tracking, Yieldmo launched the https://yieldmo.com/yieldmo-privacy-first-marketplace/ a series of privacy-first PMP deals that transact on non-addressable inventory and vastly outperform benchmarks. It has also developed an exchange built on privacy first signals, such as contextual and performance, that respects consumers’ privacy and provides effective advertising without using personal information. With GDPR in effect since 2018, it’s no surprise that Europe far surpasses the US with its protection and privacy regulations. As privacy-first becomes the norm worldwide, Yieldmo will continue to build out its international expansion in 2022.
What do Clients Have to Say?
“Yieldmo’s contextual approach helped us find high performance impressions for a great value. They were both our largest traffic driver and conversion driver. Yieldmo’s performance gave us great confidence in the power of context as we move to a world with fewer and fewer cookies.” Julie Fleischer, Chief Growth Officer, Encantos
“Yieldmo provided us with a new and interesting method to reach our consumers and increase our CTR that we haven’t been presented with in the past. Given the results of this test, we’ve definitely acknowledged the benefits of attention-based optimization.” Natalie Benoit, Shopper Marketing Senior Manager at GE Appliances.
