Yahoo Search Marketing is now live, so is the supporting blog. Read more by going here.

Connection.

It’s what you need between you and your customers/prospective customers. Connection — to the products and people that help you market through Yahoo! — is also what we intend to provide to you in this blog.

We’ll connect you to the people and products that can help you make sense of the ever-changing world of digital marketing, and take advantage of everything that Yahoo! has to offer. While we’re not the first blog in the Yahoo! family (see the Blogroll to the right), we are no less excited about launching ours, because we believe it is the ideal method for informally communicating with our customers and other influencers.

Why Now?
The introduction of our new marketing platform makes this the perfect time to jump feet-first into the blogosphere. It represents a huge first step in providing solutions to the marketing challenges you face now, and those you’ll face as media continues to evolve. We believe that our completely redesigned marketing platform sets a new industry standard, with numerous advanced, easy-to-use features that will help you better connect with Yahoo!’s vast and valuable audience.

During the first few months, we’ll use the blog primarily to inform and educate you about the many features and benefits of our new platform, and the important administrative details that you’ll need to know before your upgrade date. We encourage you to bookmark this page, or better yet, subscribe to the blog via RSS, so you can have all the info you need to hit the ground running.

As we move past the upgrade, we will begin to take a broader look at online marketing and the challenges you face. We’ll examine how 21st Century media such as Tivo, satellite radio and the Internet are contributing to the challenges faced by traditional marketing channels like TV, radio and newspapers. Audiences are fragmenting, and advertisers both large and small are looking for understanding and insight into alternate solutions that will provide the connections they need to their target markets.

Yahoo! offers a variety of marketing products that are suitable for businesses of all sizes, including display, video and many others. The innovation here never stops, and this blog will be the first place to hear about it.

A Two-Way Street
The community that a blog helps create is equally important to us. Through the comments section of each post, readers will be able to share their opinions and ideas with our folks here, as well as with other online marketers. The blog gives you a direct pipeline to Yahoo! execs, and provides an opportunity to help shape future product offerings. We pledge to regularly respond to your comments and questions in an honest and direct way.

Our commitment to you is to make this interactive — and worth your precious time — and we invite you to help shape the content of the blog…what would you like to know about? Just add your comments directly to one or more of the blog posts.

As always, thank you for your business. We’ve begun inviting U.S. advertisers to upgrade their accounts to the new Sponsored Search, and invitations will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year. We look forward to delivering it to you soon.
– Steve Mitgang, Senior Vice President, Ad Products and Platforms