Millard Departure is not a “Good Thing” for Yahoo!
One of the very best things Terry Semel ever did at Yahoo! was hire Wenda Harris Millard in October of 2001.
With projections showing display advertising now growing faster than search ads, Martha Stewart should be having a house party to celebrate Millard’s arrival at the eponymous Martha Stewart Omnimedia as President of Media. Her new employee does not bake cookies. Instead, she is a widely acknowledged rock star on Madison Avenue.
From her regular table at the Four Seasons, Millard is credited with the building of Yahoo! display ad business that drove the company from $717 million in revenue to $6.4 billion in 2006. When she arrived in 2001, Yahoo! had burned its bridges with Madison Avenue, showing them “the hand” in favor of going direct to clients for .com mega deals.
Wenda showed up, complete with coat tails (her teams from Ziff and DoubleClick Media), put out the fires and went about building deep relationships between Yahoo! and its ad agency clients. This is a special challenge for any company headquartered west of the Hudson River (it’s just one of those cultural things—California thinks New York can’t do tech and New York thinks California can’t do media).
No wonder Omnicom’s OMD is rumored to have recruited her as a CEO. Millard’s exit should not be a surprise given team members have been exiting for the last 12+ months including Beth-Ann Eason who landed at—you got it—MSO in January as SVP Internet.
As for Yahoo!, Wenda has left them an enormous asset. If Google wants one thing Yahoo! has, it would be their agency relationships and success in the display ad realm. Let’s hope Dave Karnstedt, Yahoo!’s new head of North American ad sales, gives Google a good run. No doubt the needs of online agencies and SEMs are merging (colliding?) and advertisers do want one stop shopping (this has been our contention for a long time).
Six years from now, if you look back and wonder why the market cap of cookie companies (and MSO) have had a great run, remember the rock star. Having a rock star is a very good thing.
Related links: The Wall Street Journal, All Things Digital, NY Post, PaidContent.org, BusinessWeek, HipMojo.com, Yahoo!, Associated Press.
-- Jay Sears
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