Yahoo is working with AWS as a preferred public cloud provider for its advertising technology business Yahoo Ad Tech.
All Yahoo advertising technology workloads — including its media-buying and supply-side platforms, analytics, and identity solutions and products — are being switched from Yahoo on-premises data centers to AWS as part of an ongoing digital transformation strategy, according to AWS last month.
The goal is to reduce IT infrastructure costs, transform advertising operations, and develop tailored and immersive solutions to help brands better connect with audiences.
Improving Ad Performance and Revenue
With a current reach of 540 million people worldwide, Yahoo Ad Tech covers a large inventory of mobile, web, and TV channels.
By moving its central data platform to AWS, then, Yahoo Ad Tech aims to improve advertising effectiveness, personalization, and engagement for its advertiser and publishing customers.
Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) compute-optimized instances will provide publishers, advertising agencies, and brand customers with insights on real-time advertising performance. In addition, this platform will reduce the time it takes to deliver the insights advertisers need to reach the right audiences at the right times and in the right formats.
The AWS global infrastructure and portfolio of analytics, compute, machine learning (ML), serverless, and storage capabilities will help Yahoo’s ad-decisioning engines help attract more advertisers and manage their ad business more effectively while facilitating the pace of innovation.
This will show up in ways such as ad measurement capabilities, optimizing real-time ad bidding, and honing ad inventory and effectiveness to determine the best mix of advertising.
Yahoo Using AWS Data Storage, Analytics, and Cloud Training
The AWS-Yahoo Ad Tech deal takes advantage of a number of recent additions and updates to the Amazon service portfolio.
For example, the implementation of the latest version of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) makes it possible to construct a centralized data lake to store hundreds of petabytes of data. Beyond storage at a massive scale, this data lake will enable Yahoo Ad Tech to eliminate internal data silos.
The company can then tap into recently enhanced AWS analytics services, including Amazon EMR, a cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools, and Amazon Athena, an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data. These rapid analysis capabilities heighten the ability to spot advertising trends, target audiences, and deliver ad performance insights.
Amazon SageMaker, for building, training, and deploying ML models in the cloud and at the edge, will also be used to streamline Yahoo Ad Tech’s ML pipeline.
AWS will also help Yahoo Ad Tech via cloud skills training. The company is educating personnel using the AWS Designated Virtual Trainer (DVT) program, which will provide the company with more than 50 instructor-led classes in 2022. The target is for 2,000 IT employees to receive foundational cloud training over the next two years. These classes will help employees develop skills in application development, data management, and security to support Yahoo’s migration goals.
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“Move Faster”
Aaron Lake, SVP of platforms engineering and CIO at Yahoo, said that “by harnessing the power of AWS, we’ll be able to move faster and give our customers what they value most — advertising solutions that provide the right combination of performance, audiences, and revenue growth.”
Running all of Yahoo Ad Tech on AWS gives Yahoo “a broad portfolio of services that will allow us to help advertisers achieve the returns they want by providing them with audience targeting, while our ad publisher customers are able to scale and monetize their ad space,” Lake said.
Matt Garman, SVP of sales, marketing, and global services at AWS, said media and digital advertising companies rely on AWS as their cloud provider “because we help them deliver performance and drive real growth.”
“We’re excited to help Yahoo accelerate its migration to the cloud and bring innovative solutions that help advertisers serve customers all over the world,” Garman said.
AWS Leads Market
AWS holds the largest estimated share of the cloud infrastructure market at 34%, as of Q3 2022, according to Synergy Research Group. Microsoft Azure holds the second position at 21%.
To maintain that position, it steadily expands its services to support virtually any cloud workload. Currently, it has more than 200 services, from compute to artificial intelligence (AI) and from the Internet of Things (IoT) to application development.
Gartner analyst Raj Bala noted that AWS was named a leader and scored highest in its recent “Magic Quadrant” for cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS).
“AWS has a future focus on expanding the size of the market it serves by moving into new territory, such as private 5G and partnerships with telecoms,” Bala said.
“AWS continues to have the greatest breadth and depth of capabilities of any provider in the market for CIPS.”
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