Beet@20: Yahoo’s Matt Sanchez Sees AI Driving Advertising’s Next Chapter
Twenty years ago, online video was still a novelty, programmatic advertising was in its infancy and the idea that Walmart would become a major player in the media business might have earned someone a concerned look from the store manager.
Today, video creators command enormous audiences, retailers operate sophisticated advertising networks and artificial intelligence threatens to reinvent how marketers spend their money.
For Matt Sanchez, president and chief operating officer of Yahoo, the past two decades have demonstrated how technology can transform media distribution, advertising and the relationship between publishers and consumers.
In an interview with Andy Plesser, founder and chief executive of Beet.TV, marking Beet.TV’s 20th anniversary, Sanchez reflected on the democratization of video, the challenges facing digital publishers and the growing importance of connecting advertising investments to measurable business results.
He also discussed Yahoo’s programmatic advertising strategy, its work with Walmart and Magnite and the opportunities AI presents for the next generation of digital media.
Everyone’s a publisher now
One of the most consequential developments in digital media has been the ability of virtually anyone to create video and reach an audience, Sanchez said.
Early video platforms helped remove the technical and financial barriers that once limited content distribution to established media companies.
Sanchez recalled working with Beet.TV during its earliest days, when his video technology platform helped power the publication’s online video.
The subsequent explosion of digital creativity exceeded what many industry pioneers could have imagined.
“I don’t know that we ever would’ve seen the creator economy at the scale it is today, 20 years ago,” Sanchez said.
He described the democratization of content creation as a defining achievement of the internet era.
Everyone can now reach an audience without needing a television network, a production studio or the approval of someone who wears expensive glasses and calls himself a development executive.
Of course, giving everyone the ability to publish video doesn’t guarantee that everyone has something interesting to say.
But the resulting creator economy has fundamentally changed how audiences discover entertainment, information and commercial messages.
Publishers need something better than search traffic
While content creation has become easier, building a sustainable digital publishing business remains difficult.
Sanchez, who previously worked at Hearst before joining Yahoo, said publishers face growing uncertainty about how audiences will discover their content.
For much of the internet’s history, search engines provided an important distribution channel. Publishers optimized their content to attract visitors who might otherwise never encounter their brands.
That model is becoming less predictable as digital discovery evolves.
Sanchez believes the publishers best positioned to survive will be those that establish direct relationships with consumers and give them compelling reasons to return.
“The brands that build direct connections with audiences create a lot of utility for their customers,” he said.
Successful publishers, he explained, will develop useful services and habitual engagement rather than depend entirely on traffic from outside platforms.
That could mean combining journalism with interactive tools, specialized information and services that consumers find valuable in their daily lives.
“But you’ve gotta have that direct connection,” Sanchez said. “You’ve gotta build real sticky behaviors with your audience.”
For publishers accustomed to celebrating every unexpected surge in search traffic, the message is sobering. A visitor who arrives once through a search result isn’t necessarily a loyal customer.
The challenge is becoming a destination rather than merely another stop on the internet’s endless sightseeing tour.
Advertisers want relationships, not just impressions
Stronger audience relationships also create opportunities for advertisers.
Publishers with loyal users can develop a deeper understanding of consumer interests and behavior, helping brands communicate in ways that feel relevant to the surrounding experience.
“I think if you have that, what that means is that you have a better understanding of your consumer,” Sanchez said.
That knowledge can help advertisers integrate their messages more naturally into content and services that audiences already value.
Sanchez contrasted these relationships with advertising based on capturing consumer intent through search.
Search advertising can be effective, but a transaction-driven interaction doesn’t necessarily create the same lasting connection as a publisher that consumers visit regularly.
For marketers, the distinction could become increasingly important as audience fragmentation complicates targeting and measurement.
A loyal audience offers more than another opportunity to display an advertisement. It gives brands a chance to participate in an ongoing relationship.
Programmatic grows beyond its original ambitions
Programmatic advertising has undergone its own transformation over the past two decades.
What began largely as a way to automate digital advertising transactions has evolved into a sophisticated system combining identity resolution, audience data and cross-channel decision-making.
Sanchez said one of the biggest advances has been the ability to coordinate advertising across connected television, display and potentially search and social platforms.
Rather than managing each channel as a separate investment, marketers can increasingly evaluate how different exposures contribute to the overall customer journey.
The next phase will place greater emphasis on business outcomes.
“Where I think it goes from here is, is really much more outcomes based,” Sanchez said.
That means moving beyond the mechanics of buying impressions to understanding whether advertising investments generate measurable value.
For an industry that has spent considerable time debating the meaning of an impression, the prospect of measuring actual business results might qualify as progress.
Sanchez said better measurement will depend on combining advertisers’ information with the rich consumer data available to publishers that maintain direct audience relationships.
Yahoo wants to connect the advertising dots
Yahoo is positioning its demand-side platform, Yahoo DSP, to help advertisers coordinate investments across channels using consumer data, identity technology and real-time optimization.
Sanchez highlighted Yahoo’s identity graph and ConnectID as important components of that strategy.
The platform combines Yahoo’s consumer information with data supplied by advertisers to inform campaign decisions.
It also uses in-flight optimization tools to adjust investments while campaigns are running.
The objective is to help marketers allocate spending more effectively across different media environments rather than optimize each channel in isolation.
Sanchez said the approach can lead to “a much better, more sophisticated deployment of dollars across channel.”
Ultimately, Yahoo wants advertisers to evaluate their investments through a more unified understanding of consumer behavior and campaign performance.
Walmart joins the media establishment
Perhaps no development better illustrates the changing advertising landscape than the emergence of retailers as major media companies.
Walmart, once known primarily for selling groceries, clothing and household necessities, now plays a growing role in the advertising ecosystem.
The retailer’s shopper information offers marketers a valuable connection between advertising exposure and purchasing behavior.
Sanchez discussed Yahoo’s work involving Walmart and advertising technology company Magnite, describing how retail data and connected television inventory can be brought together.
The broader opportunity involves reducing fragmentation among retail media networks, connected television and digital display advertising.
“The fragmentation of retail media networks and CTV, and digital display, you know, ultimately is creates missed opportunities,” Sanchez said.
By combining video inventory with retail data and Yahoo DSP’s targeting and decision-making capabilities, advertisers could gain a more complete understanding of how campaigns influence consumer purchases.
Sanchez said the approach allows marketers to “connect the dots from CTV all the way to retail media networks.”
For advertisers, that could mean better measurement across the customer journey, from seeing a commercial on television to buying the advertised product.
For Walmart, it represents another way to monetize its relationship with shoppers.
And for traditional publishers, it’s another reminder that their competitors increasingly include companies whose primary business once had nothing to do with selling advertising.
AI promises another advertising renaissance
Looking ahead, Sanchez sees artificial intelligence as both a competitive threat and a major opportunity.
AI could help advertising platforms discover relationships within large datasets that human analysts might overlook.
Those insights could improve campaign performance, identify more effective combinations of media investments and automate complicated workflows.
Sanchez also expects AI to make cross-channel advertising operations more efficient, reducing the manual effort required to manage campaigns and evaluate results.
“I think that that AI point is both a threat and a massive opportunity for the industry,” he said.
The technology’s potential extends beyond automating existing processes. It could enable entirely new approaches to advertising decisions and collaboration among technology platforms, agencies and brands.
“I think it’s gonna unlock a whole new renaissance of capability,” Sanchez said.
Yahoo is investing in these capabilities as it seeks to help advertising partners generate stronger business results.
For Sanchez, the lesson of the past 20 years is that digital media’s evolution has been driven by expanding access, improving technology and finding new ways to connect audiences with content and advertisers.
The next chapter could be shaped by AI systems that make those connections faster and more intelligent.
Whether they can also persuade consumers to pay attention to advertising is another question.
After two decades of technological innovation, that remains one of the industry’s more stubborn problems.
You’re watching “From Digital Disruption to the AI Era”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series for Beet.TV’s 20th Anniversary. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
Twenty years ago, online video was still a novelty, programmatic advertising was in its infancy and the idea that Walmart would become a major player in the media business might have earned someone a concerned look from the store manager.
Today, video creators command enormous audiences, retailers operate sophisticated advertising networks and artificial intelligence threatens to reinvent how marketers spend their money.
For Matt Sanchez, president and chief operating officer of Yahoo, the past two decades have demonstrated how technology can transform media distribution, advertising and the relationship between publishers and consumers.
In an interview with Andy Plesser, founder and chief executive of Beet.TV, marking Beet.TV’s 20th anniversary, Sanchez reflected on the democratization of video, the challenges facing digital publishers and the growing importance of connecting advertising investments to measurable business results.
He also discussed Yahoo’s programmatic advertising strategy, its work with Walmart and Magnite and the opportunities AI presents for the next generation of digital media.
Everyone’s a publisher now
One of the most consequential developments in digital media has been the ability of virtually anyone to create video and reach an audience, Sanchez said.
Early video platforms helped remove the technical and financial barriers that once limited content distribution to established media companies.
Sanchez recalled working with Beet.TV during its earliest days, when his video technology platform helped power the publication’s online video.
The subsequent explosion of digital creativity exceeded what many industry pioneers could have imagined.
“I don’t know that we ever would’ve seen the creator economy at the scale it is today, 20 years ago,” Sanchez said.
He described the democratization of content creation as a defining achievement of the internet era.
Everyone can now reach an audience without needing a television network, a production studio or the approval of someone who wears expensive glasses and calls himself a development executive.
Of course, giving everyone the ability to publish video doesn’t guarantee that everyone has something interesting to say.
But the resulting creator economy has fundamentally changed how audiences discover entertainment, information and commercial messages.
Publishers need something better than search traffic
While content creation has become easier, building a sustainable digital publishing business remains difficult.
Sanchez, who previously worked at Hearst before joining Yahoo, said publishers face growing uncertainty about how audiences will discover their content.
For much of the internet’s history, search engines provided an important distribution channel. Publishers optimized their content to attract visitors who might otherwise never encounter their brands.
That model is becoming less predictable as digital discovery evolves.
Sanchez believes the publishers best positioned to survive will be those that establish direct relationships with consumers and give them compelling reasons to return.
“The brands that build direct connections with audiences create a lot of utility for their customers,” he said.
Successful publishers, he explained, will develop useful services and habitual engagement rather than depend entirely on traffic from outside platforms.
That could mean combining journalism with interactive tools, specialized information and services that consumers find valuable in their daily lives.
“But you’ve gotta have that direct connection,” Sanchez said. “You’ve gotta build real sticky behaviors with your audience.”
For publishers accustomed to celebrating every unexpected surge in search traffic, the message is sobering. A visitor who arrives once through a search result isn’t necessarily a loyal customer.
The challenge is becoming a destination rather than merely another stop on the internet’s endless sightseeing tour.
Advertisers want relationships, not just impressions
Stronger audience relationships also create opportunities for advertisers.
Publishers with loyal users can develop a deeper understanding of consumer interests and behavior, helping brands communicate in ways that feel relevant to the surrounding experience.
“I think if you have that, what that means is that you have a better understanding of your consumer,” Sanchez said.
That knowledge can help advertisers integrate their messages more naturally into content and services that audiences already value.
Sanchez contrasted these relationships with advertising based on capturing consumer intent through search.
Search advertising can be effective, but a transaction-driven interaction doesn’t necessarily create the same lasting connection as a publisher that consumers visit regularly.
For marketers, the distinction could become increasingly important as audience fragmentation complicates targeting and measurement.
A loyal audience offers more than another opportunity to display an advertisement. It gives brands a chance to participate in an ongoing relationship.
Programmatic grows beyond its original ambitions
Programmatic advertising has undergone its own transformation over the past two decades.
What began largely as a way to automate digital advertising transactions has evolved into a sophisticated system combining identity resolution, audience data and cross-channel decision-making.
Sanchez said one of the biggest advances has been the ability to coordinate advertising across connected television, display and potentially search and social platforms.
Rather than managing each channel as a separate investment, marketers can increasingly evaluate how different exposures contribute to the overall customer journey.
The next phase will place greater emphasis on business outcomes.
“Where I think it goes from here is, is really much more outcomes based,” Sanchez said.
That means moving beyond the mechanics of buying impressions to understanding whether advertising investments generate measurable value.
For an industry that has spent considerable time debating the meaning of an impression, the prospect of measuring actual business results might qualify as progress.
Sanchez said better measurement will depend on combining advertisers’ information with the rich consumer data available to publishers that maintain direct audience relationships.
Yahoo wants to connect the advertising dots
Yahoo is positioning its demand-side platform, Yahoo DSP, to help advertisers coordinate investments across channels using consumer data, identity technology and real-time optimization.
Sanchez highlighted Yahoo’s identity graph and ConnectID as important components of that strategy.
The platform combines Yahoo’s consumer information with data supplied by advertisers to inform campaign decisions.
It also uses in-flight optimization tools to adjust investments while campaigns are running.
The objective is to help marketers allocate spending more effectively across different media environments rather than optimize each channel in isolation.
Sanchez said the approach can lead to “a much better, more sophisticated deployment of dollars across channel.”
Ultimately, Yahoo wants advertisers to evaluate their investments through a more unified understanding of consumer behavior and campaign performance.
Walmart joins the media establishment
Perhaps no development better illustrates the changing advertising landscape than the emergence of retailers as major media companies.
Walmart, once known primarily for selling groceries, clothing and household necessities, now plays a growing role in the advertising ecosystem.
The retailer’s shopper information offers marketers a valuable connection between advertising exposure and purchasing behavior.
Sanchez discussed Yahoo’s work involving Walmart and advertising technology company Magnite, describing how retail data and connected television inventory can be brought together.
The broader opportunity involves reducing fragmentation among retail media networks, connected television and digital display advertising.
“The fragmentation of retail media networks and CTV, and digital display, you know, ultimately is creates missed opportunities,” Sanchez said.
By combining video inventory with retail data and Yahoo DSP’s targeting and decision-making capabilities, advertisers could gain a more complete understanding of how campaigns influence consumer purchases.
Sanchez said the approach allows marketers to “connect the dots from CTV all the way to retail media networks.”
For advertisers, that could mean better measurement across the customer journey, from seeing a commercial on television to buying the advertised product.
For Walmart, it represents another way to monetize its relationship with shoppers.
And for traditional publishers, it’s another reminder that their competitors increasingly include companies whose primary business once had nothing to do with selling advertising.
AI promises another advertising renaissance
Looking ahead, Sanchez sees artificial intelligence as both a competitive threat and a major opportunity.
AI could help advertising platforms discover relationships within large datasets that human analysts might overlook.
Those insights could improve campaign performance, identify more effective combinations of media investments and automate complicated workflows.
Sanchez also expects AI to make cross-channel advertising operations more efficient, reducing the manual effort required to manage campaigns and evaluate results.
“I think that that AI point is both a threat and a massive opportunity for the industry,” he said.
The technology’s potential extends beyond automating existing processes. It could enable entirely new approaches to advertising decisions and collaboration among technology platforms, agencies and brands.
“I think it’s gonna unlock a whole new renaissance of capability,” Sanchez said.
Yahoo is investing in these capabilities as it seeks to help advertising partners generate stronger business results.
For Sanchez, the lesson of the past 20 years is that digital media’s evolution has been driven by expanding access, improving technology and finding new ways to connect audiences with content and advertisers.
The next chapter could be shaped by AI systems that make those connections faster and more intelligent.
Whether they can also persuade consumers to pay attention to advertising is another question.
After two decades of technological innovation, that remains one of the industry’s more stubborn problems.
You’re watching “From Digital Disruption to the AI Era”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series for Beet.TV’s 20th Anniversary. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
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