Conversational Ads

Soon after launching the Gemini ad platform with Yahoo!, we saw a flood of what sentiment surveys told us were low-quality, robotic ads that weren’t connecting with our customers. In turn, ad engagement metrics were on the decline, and I felt the need to experiment with new ad formats. The goal: set a new, higher bar for our ad formats (maybe win some awards along the way) that would measurably improve engagement metrics between our end-user customers and our brand customers, with a focus on mobile native.

Use native app features to create conversational experiences between brands who advertise on our platform and the customers who value connecting with them.

Yahoo!’s acquisition of Tumblr provided a new, high-engagement user flow that could facilitate a conversational ad flow. The Tumblr app had an extremely high open rate when push alerts were on and a user got the signal that someone liked their post. Hooking into this mutually beneficial behavior, the concept above illustrates how top-tier brands would show up as an actual Tumblr user, with their own account, liking people’s content.

For the signal to feel authentic, the match between the brand and the end-user’s content had to be highly relevant. The back end that powered the matchmaking started by indexing the user-created tags. A similar dataset was created for brands based on their own content on the Tumblr platform. When the user-generated content had a high-confidence relevancy match for a brand offering available, tapping the brand’s like would reveal the offering in a way that felt human. Once tapped, the brand doesn’t necessarily show a traditional ad format but could layer on top of the end-user’s content as shown in the far-right panel.