How This GM Anticipated a Customer Need Before the iPad Revolutionized Advertising

Uh, would you be interested in an example from sort of my, my marketing world from what we were just talking about, or, uh, I have an example from my, OK, OK, um, you know, so, um. Actually, one of my favorite examples on kind of anticipating an unmet customer need. I'm gonna go back a little earlier in my career because uh it's one of my favorite um um. Internet scale experiences, right? So this is, I'm at Yahoo, uh, I'm leading at the time a product and, um, experience design team, and part of the charter that, uh, the, uh, the then, um, leadership has given us is, uh, you know, of course, you know, focus on getting, I'm talking about the ad products that, yeah, you know, display ads and, uh, search ads and such, you know, part of our charter is to, of course, you know, uh, keep innovating on what's next and, um. This is the time when the, the iPad ecosystem is really just starting to take off. So I'm going, you know, I've gone back a little bit in time, but it's one of my favorite examples because it resulted in a lot of patents and a lot of customer happiness in the end, you know, so I had a team of about 8 individuals, and, you know, we were all really excited that uh the iPad is out now, and we knew that over the next 10 years the iPad would change the way advertisers, um, engaged with us in ad formats and you know advertising basically would become less annoying. That was, that was the bet. So I had this team which was delivering really well Brandon on everything, right? All our metrics were being met really my boss was happy, but this was a team that was not, um, never satisfied with what, you know, they were, they were asked to do. So, uh, on the one hand they were chomping at the bit, uh, to, uh, do some experiments with the, you know, the iPad and the iPhone ecosystem, and, you know, they wanted to do a Google 20% time if you will. On the other side, my engineering and product leaders, um, who were in touch with the biggest advertiser customers of Yahoo was talking to me about how, you know, there were some serious concerns about, you know, whether these new formats would be more intrusive and in fact they would have, um. A more negative impact on the on the end users' experience with these ads. So as I parsed what I was learning from the business and remember I'm still a product guy, I haven't become a marketing guy yet, and I'm talking to my team, I realized that there's an opportunity here for us to create some next generation experiences that would, uh, show these customers and these advertisers, especially the art of the possible, um, help us almost, uh, think 2 to 3 years ahead of the competition at the time. And give my team a sandbox to tap into all this amazing latent energy that they have that they don't, you know, frankly wanna apply to the traditional parts of the business. So within a month, here's what we did. We met every Saturday morning, um, uh, for, uh, about 6 hours as a team, and we would essentially go through, think of the biggest sort of prototyping of. Approach you can, you can take to coming up with, um, you know, dozens and dozens of next generation concepts of prototypes for ad experiences and then on Monday I would start going and pitching these to my account managers and engineering leaders and say, you know, I know we have some really friendly advertiser customers. I would love to show them the art of the possible on what we as Yahoo could do for them, um, with next generation iPad experiences. About 4 weeks and about um, you know, 20 interviews later and about let's just say, you know, 10 prototypes later, um, we had a series set of advertisers who were really interested in being pilot customers for these next gen ad experiences and the team got now really excited because they had validation that these ideas are ideas that they should keep working on even if no one sort of asked them to. Fast forward about a year later we generated 4 patents out of this for Yahoo within within the team. And many of these, these ideas that were incubated with this initial set of um advertisers ended up making their way into the next gen ad formats as part of our main traditional roadmap. Um, the reason I'm proud of this experience, uh, even like 10 years later, you know, it's a very specific product experience is because, um. If we had started only with the build side or the ask side, I don't think we would have gotten the right results. I think it was a combination of like just hearing what we were hearing about something very, you know, something very commonplace ads suck. Nobody likes ads and challenging that, but, uh, challenging that in a way that, you know, we were sort of testing, building, testing, building, testing, sort of back and forth over multiple rounds, um, and actually without anyone asking us to at the time.

So that's partially correct. The account managers that were within Yahoo that were managing the relationships with large advertisers were definitely part of our pool of interviews, but they had enough end users in these large advertisers who were existing users of the Apex and Panama platforms, uh, which were Yahoo's two big platforms at the time that we were able to get them also into sort of. Of these 45 minute combination of uh exploratory interviews plus I'm showing that. Great.

I think part of, uh, you know, part of my observation after the first, this didn't happen till the 1st 5 interviews, right? But after the 1st 5 interviews, I realized that ultimately many of these advertisers were heavily relying on us to. To show them something that uh they hadn't seen in terms of formats and experiences. So for example, you know, they were used to home page takeovers they were used to um all the different uh you know, sizes and combinations of ads that they could do through our display advertising platform. They were even actually quite sophisticated with uh at the time we're just acquired Right Media, uh, with knowing that, you know, their ads, uh, you know, could be served at one time in a, in an algorithmic fashion that they trusted. The challenge that they were facing was that ultimately, um, you know, the, uh, if you looked at the numbers on um the impressions these ads were serving or the amount of engagement these ads were driving through the first, uh, you know, to the next 5 interviews, it became clear to me that they were like. You know, ultimately, we, we want more innovation, you know, and so none of them, by the way, said iPad, none of them said, you know, touch experiences, none of that language came up because they were, they thought that this interview was more about how to drive more efficiency with the existing kind of ad units. So of course they gave me some interesting ideas like, hey, if these units were, uh, you know, if these units were more dynamic of the, of these units were more interactive, that'd be helpful. But by the time I got to my 6th, 7th interview. It became clear to me that um Uh, if I needed to show them something, and so the next set of interviews what we did is we actually got, um, these iPad, so we had, by the way, prototype experiences on the iPad and I'm talking about, you know, like imagine experiences where, uh, you have something on the screen that you're actually touching and when you're touching now you're getting a three dimensional experience with sound and things of that sort, um. It was only when I started showing them these experiences and then their feedback was um oh wait, we're running a campaign right now where something like this could be very helpful um uh when are you guys planning to launch this? Is this on your roadmap and these questions started coming that I said, you know, there's, we're hunting onto something very interesting here, um, and. What I realized was that for them the key question was interactive engagement. They wanted new ways to experience interact, you know, for their end users to, uh, experience, uh, the brand for interactive engagement, you know, so for example, a consumer goods brand that's trying to sell a new soup and things of that sort, and, uh, uh, so that's when I took another step back. And I went, I immediately brought the product team in, which was, you know, the, the main, the main product team, and I said, guys, I wanna show you like what we have discovered so far from these 1st 10 interviews because I also knew if I went so far with them that they now started thinking that this was real product, I would have, I would create a whole different sort of can of worms.

Uh, the ultimate impact of the solution was that we, uh, were able to, uh, these new, uh, next gen ad formats, we were able to bring it into the core product roadmap. Uh, we rolled it out in the next, uh, release of Apex, which was about 1 year down. Uh, the team started working on a series of patents out of which 4 got filed eventually, and, um, you know, I would say that, uh, you know, in terms of the most direct impact I can talk about, uh, is the impact on advertiser NPS. You know, so over the, uh, you know, after these, uh, these releases happened, uh, I kept track for the next two quarters, uh, which was kind of around the time I was, uh, with Yahoo, um, with the teams on like how our advertiser NPS was trending, and I advertiser NPS after these introductions actually went up.

mean, I would say like 3 points, uh, you know, so it was probably in the forties, probably went to like 43, 44. I'm talking about numbers from like 10 years ago now, Brandon, and that's that's why I, I hesitate to share revenue numbers because I think those are probably not