Yahoo has started integrating imagery in its search result ads. If you search fro certain brand names, you’ll see a video thumbnail inviting you to play a video or an image with a link to the site. Yahoo is calling this Rich Ads, according to the New York Times, which quotes Yahoo’s Tim Mayer saying this “moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers”
The NYT writes “Yahoo is charging a monthly fee for the service, versus the auction-based pricing of search advertising, which Mr. Mayer said Yahoo might use in the future.” For now “only certain large, brand-focused advertisers” (like SoBe, Pepsi, Pedigree and Home Depot) are part of the program.
This is part of Yahoo’s ‘rich search’ initiative, which will be available to big name brands to allow commercials to actually be accessible from the SERPs. Yahoo is test driving a new pricing strategy in which the only available keywords are branded ones, letting brands dominate the top of the search reply page. Pricing is a monthly flat fee determined by a combination of the advertiser’s industry vertical and their past performance. Yahoo is also considering flat-fee pricing across standard search advertising, breaking with bid and quality management.
Google hasn’t jumped on the video train full fledged (perhaps being too busy monetizing video through YouTube); so far all they have offered in their search results are image ads in image search results, banners for one of the Bourne movies which was not disclosed as a promotion in the beginning, plus boxes which expand images, search results with non-ad graphics in main Google results and special holiday decorations around ads that are only shown at specific times of the year.
Will this allow Yahoo to take the lead? Probably not. It should, however, spur the ever competitive Google to step up to the plate and add thumbnail video to its own results.