Yahoo's Lisa Utzschneider talks data strategy
Yahoo's chief revenue officer (CRO) Lisa Utzschneider is in the process of devising how best to bolster the company’s earnings, which includes working with select advertisers on pilot schemes, here she speaks with The Drum about her ambitions to monetise its rich repository of audience insights.
In just under a year since defecting from Amazon to Yahoo, Lisa Utzschneider was recently promoted from VP of sales to CRO, and now ranks as one of the chief lieutenants of chief executive Marissa Mayer.
This involves putting into place its much feted MaVeNS (mobile, video, and native) revenue strategy. She takes up the reins at a crucial stage of transition for not just Yahoo, but every web-based media owner, as audiences’ media consumption fragments.
With over 43 million visitors to its media properties on a daily basis, Yahoo is one of the biggest media owners in the world, and has at its disposal swathes of audience data, according to Utzschneider. She added: “One of the first things I looked at when coming in was what kind of data do we have, how valuable it is to marketers and how can they harness it."
At present, Utzschneider and company are in the process of thinking through what its data strategy should be.
“The good news is that we have lots of interesting data, especially between the acquisitions of BrightRoll, Flurry and Tumblr. With those platforms there’s so much opportunity because we’ve been able to maintain the consumer trust of the Yahoo brand [with users of the three services].
“So right now, we’re working very closely with our product team, and thinking we should crawl, walk and then run,” she explained.
Utzschneider claimed this involves identifying what kind of data marketers and agencies need to improve their audiences targeting and then begin experimenting with their assets in partnership.
A crucial part of this strategy is helping advertisers understand how best to engage with audiences on mobile devices, given that such devices are now the primary medium of web-based media consumption.
“One area we are really trying to crack is mobile. Given that we’ve acquired Flurry, we now have a pretty good picture of how consumers are now spending their time, and what they’re doing in apps. That’s an area where we’re working with marketers. We’re looking at Flurry data, and then trying to connect that with other Yahoo data,” she explains.
In addition, Yahoo is also in the process of helping advertisers understand how best to synchronise their mobile advertising executions with those on desktop - an equivalent to Facebook’s Social Graph, or Google’s Device Graph.
Utzschneider added: “The cross-device story is something we’re still working on, it’s really difficult to get that right. I’m a big believer in getting two screens right first [before trying to get things cross-screen]. So starting with the desktop, and then focusing on tablets, but we are starting to experiment with cross-device capabilities.”