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Publicis Groupe and Yahoo! join forces on VivaKc

By Andrew Redfern @ 25th June 2008 3:33 pm

Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) unveiled innovative technology initiatives designed to help Publicis Groupe’s clients seize the important global opportunities in mobile advertising.

The initiatives also aim to drive greater efficiency in the way advertising is bought and sold online. As more leading brands go mobile, Yahoo! and Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi plan to leverage Yahoo!’s mobile platform to help brands broaden their reach and more deeply engage mobile consumers with breakthrough advertising solutions. The two companies will also work to integrate Publicis’ current media buying systems with Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange, and with AMP! from Yahoo! when it is introduced.

“Our goal in working together with advertisers and agencies is to help them build brands, reach consumers and increase sales in new ways,” said Sue Decker, President, Yahoo! Inc. “Through this relationship, Yahoo! and Publicis will empower the next generation of innovative advertising solutions.”

“This partnership with Yahoo! takes the biggest challenge facing marketers today-the need for hyper-personalization on a massive scale-and turns it into a scalable, direct opportunity for Publicis Groupe clients,” said David Kenny, Managing Partner of Publicis Groupe VivaKi. “By creating an evolved business structure built specifically to capitalize on this medium, we’ll advance the larger industry and in the process set new standards for online advertising innovation.”

The two companies’ mobile initiative is the initial showcase for a relationship focusing on technology integration and openness to help brands tailor their messaging and make it possible for them to reach their target customers on both the PC and the mobile telephone.

Phonevalley, Publicis Groupe’s mobile marketing agency, will be the first global agency to integrate Blueprint, Yahoo!’s leading-edge mobile developer platform language, as a tool to help its clients scale brand messages globally, speed their time to market and remove traditional barriers of scarce development resources and high costs.

In addition, Yahoo! and Publicis Groupe will work to enable brands to tailor their message in a more relevant way to the unique consumer, given the hyper-personalized nature of the mobile device. Specifically, Yahoo! will leverage its Smart Ads technology for the mobile platform to enable numerous permutations of a given brand’s message, and Publicis Groupe will tap into this system to develop correlating, personal microsites relevant to these “smart mobile ads”.

“We are focused on helping our clients reach their audiences where they are – and that is increasingly on mobile devices,” continued Alexandre Mars, Phonevalley CEO and Head of Mobile Publicis Groupe. “By integrating Yahoo! Blueprint, we are able to easily create advertising for the rapidly growing and increasingly lucrative mobile medium.”

The technology initiative extends beyond mobile to include the adoption and continued innovation of other next-generation platforms. Publicis Groupe will work to integrate their current media buying systems with Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange, a technology platform that fosters the largest open community of buyers and sellers including advertisers, agencies, publishers and networks. This integration will enable Publicis clients to apply their deep insights to their Exchange buys in order to help their clients more effectively and efficiently reach specific demographics and purchasers -such as moms or travelers- online in a single campaign buy.

Publicis Groupe also plans to leverage the capabilities of AMP! from Yahoo!, the company’s advertising management platform. AMP! from Yahoo! is designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online. Yahoo! will work closely with Publicis Groupe to ensure that the platform accommodates the complex set of requirements a leading global agency partner like Publicis Groupe has to deliver on behalf of their clients.

These broader platform initiatives will serve as the foundation for the advertising industry’s first “on-demand audience network”, announced earlier today by Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center, a global digital knowledge and resource center that spans Digitas, Starcom MediaVest Group, Zenith Optimedia and Denuo.

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