Copyright Adweek
As competition intensifies among adtech heavyweights, Yahoo is bringing humor to the fight. The company’s demand-side platform (DSP) on Monday debuted its first-ever connected TV campaign, fronted by comedic persona Troy Hawke, as it looks to carve out more share in the crowded market dominated by Google, Amazon, and The Trade Desk. In the campaign, Hawke, a character created and performed by U.K. comedian Milo McCabe, awkwardly-yet-charmingly intrudes into the everyday happenings at an unnamed marketing business. Ultimately, he endorses the use of Yahoo DSP to help advertisers buy media across the web—in his trademark poshness. In one spot, he coins the uncomfortably long acronym CYMGWYD for “crush your marketing goals with Yahoo DSP.” The two 30-second spots and one 15-second spot were created with the help of production studio Conscious Minds. “Troy brings the same confidence and personality that define our platform and the way we’ve built it, showing that performance doesn’t have to be rigid or overly technical,” Adam Roodman, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo DSP, told ADWEEK in a statement. “It can be smart, effective, human, and full of character.” McCabe’s Troy Hawke character has amassed a following of 1.6 million followers on Instagram and 1.3 million followers on TikTok. The CTV ads are part of a larger marketing initiative that will extend to social and email. Two additional spots fronted by Troy Hawke were produced exclusively for social. The effort expands on Yahoo’s overarching ‘Expect Results’ messaging, which launched earlier this year with a brand campaign claiming that the DSP outperformed competitors in 90% of head-to-head tests. It’s a message sure to garner attention at a time when DSPs are competing fiercely over advertising dollars on the basis of performance and cost. The most heated rivalry is playing out between The Trade Desk and Amazon. Amazon has offered free head-to-head DSP testing to some agencies, a leaked deck revealed, while The Trade Desk has released a brand campaign jabbing at walled gardens like Amazon, Meta, and Google. In the midst of the madness, Yahoo has been holding its own. In September, ADWEEK reported that the DSP was stealing business from The Trade Desk on the promise of lower fees. Yahoo has also been expanding aggressively into commerce media in particular, inking recent deals with DoorDash, Nextdoor, online marketplace StockX, and Dollar General’s ads business. Through these deals, Yahoo will sell partners’ audience data through its DSP. Earlier this year, it announced an integration with Netflix. Yahoo’s new campaign, debuting Monday in the U.S. market, is planned, activated, and measured using Yahoo’s own DSP. The platform leverages stores of first-party data signals to connect the Yahoo DSP brand with audiences on CTV and social. “Advertisers know they can trust Yahoo DSP to deliver, as we saw in the first phase of our ‘Expect Results’ campaign,” Roodman said. “This next ad builds on that momentum and lets us have some fun with it.”
