11/17/08

It’s so easy to beat up on Yahoo these days, that when a group of leading marketing execs extol the company’s virtues, we can’t help but take notice. In an article in today’s Ad Age, Chrysler CMO Deborah Wahl Meyer, ad agency GroupM CEO Rob Norman, and Scottrade CMO Chris Maloney say Yahoo is a must buy when it comes to online advertising.

An ad on Yahoo’s home page, says Wahl Meyer, is about as valuable as four 30-second spots during a hit prime time show. That’s a big vote of confidence for a company whose share price is hovering at the $10 market.

Scottrade's Moloney also gave Yahoo a thumbs up, comparing it with Google and commenting that Yahoo is the leader when it comes to depth of content.  “Advertisers are looking at where's the traffic, volume and value is today. And today is very positive for advertisers at Yahoo,” he said.

GroupM CEO Norman said that “Yahoo has the greatest scale and the greatest potential as a brand builder in the online world.” For example, in August, the Yahoo Olympics site saw more traffic than NBC and Microsoft’s joint venture NBCOlympics.com. Also, Yahoo Video is the second ranked video site after YouTube.

Another marketer, Aimee Reker, senior VP and global director of search for marketing and ad agency MRM Worldwide, said, if she were in the financial analysis space, she’d rate it a buy. Yahoo has scale, she said. “It’s undervalued.”

Of course, praise is nice on paper, but with the online ad market crashing along with the rest of the economy, Yahoo will still need some sort of a bail out, whether in the form of a new bid from Microsoft or another suitor – to capitalize on all the warm and fuzzy feelings.

Still, Yahoo execs remain bullish. Joanne Bradford, Yahoo's new revenue chief, is optimistic that the company will come out of the recession in a stronger position than its competitors, mainly because it has so many assets. "Yahoo has more levers to pull in this market than any competitor," she said.