In the past few months Yahoo has been busy releasing new platforms, notably for mobile devices, and Monday it announced an online advertising-management platform for businesses. The company said the new platform, called AMP from Yahoo, will simplify the process of buying and selling ads online.

Yahoo described AMP as providing an integrated, Web-based solution that “allows unprecedented ease of cross-selling across a large ecosystem of buyers and sellers,” enabling advertisers to precisely and easily target audiences and publishers to “better monetize their substance.”

Boosting Connections

Hilary Schneider, a Yahoo executive vice president, said online advertising has been “cumbersome and manual” even as it has become more sophisticated. He said AMP will enable connections amoung advertisers, publishers and target audiences in ways that are not currently possible. The new platform will roll out in phases, beginning in the third quarter, through 2009.

The AMP platform allows marketers to buy from a range of ad stock, including search, display, local,

mobile and video ads. A suite of tools allows targeting based on geographic, demographic and interest-based specifications across the Yahoo network and among more than 600 newspapers.

For advertisers, the benefits include the ability to choose audiences from multiple sites or networks; to execute mass, niche and one-to-one marketing campaigns measured against specific metrics; new ways to manage business relationships with publishers; and a marketing rate of return.

For agencies, the new platform is intended to simplify targeting and buying across sites and networks; enable the continued use of back-office applications; and better analyses of campaigns.

‘Unparalleled Access’

Ad networks will have what Yahoo described as “unparalleled access” to stock and tools built specifically for these networks, as well as to innovations using AMP and an open set of application-programming interfaces, or APIs.

And Yahoo said ad-selection and inventory-management capabilities are enhanced so publishers can manage their own private networks,…

Orginal post by Top Tech News