Yahoo!'s Luke Beatty shares the benefits of crowd-sourced content for brands The Yahoo! Contributor Network "adds the people's voice" to the Yahoo! experience, according to Carol Bartz . Which sounds cool, but what does that mean exactly for advertisers? What can 400,000 writers, photographers and videographers do for your brand across Associated Content and other Yahoo! sites? Luke Beatty is the VP and GM of the Yahoo! Contributor Network,

Free webinar tomorrow will show you how to take advantage of contextual advertising Want to get more out of your advertising on Yahoo! Search and Bing? Then join us at a free webinar tomorrow, which will focus on Content Ads "text ads that are displayed next to relevant content on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites, and on participating partner web pages.

Barcelona gets ready for the big one It has been said that the rain is Spain falls mainly on the plain. Next week though, the big rain is falling on the ancient seaside port city of Barcelona, Spain, as thousands of telecomm and wireless Web pros descend on Mobile World Congress 2011 , February 14-17. MWC is indisputably the biggest yearly international conference for mobile. As you may have heard, Yahoo!

Yahoo! rich media campaign for Dr. Pepper drives engagement The Leprechaun. Sasquatch. The Alien. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny. Santa Claus. We've loved )and sometimes feared( these imaginary characters since we were kids. )Well, we all know that Sasquatch and aliens are real, though they haven't yet been discovered by science.( Yahoo! and Diet Dr.

Join Yahoo! in NYC for some food and thought on the rise of emerging platforms In September , Yahoo! hosted the first of three Leadership Breakfasts at the AD Club of New York City. If you didn't attend, you missed a lot of great discussion on the power of the consumer. But not to fear, your chance for redemption has arrived. Just point your GPS toward The Big Apple and join us for the second program on February 22,

M&C Saatchi's creative director opens up about good and bad Super Bowl ads, the "brutality" of his work, and what makes his new gig special You can almost hear James Bray's story told by the "Behind the Music" narrator: "The award-winning creative director was riding high, creating campaigns for Sprint, Netflix, Adobe and the NBA at San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Then, tragedy stuck, when he foolishly chose to accept a 'fun,

Just in time for Valentine's Day, it's the return of the Guy women can't get enough of We've highlighted a lot of ads in this space that had nothing to do with Yahoo! )aside from garnering our admiration(, so it's high time we give accolades to an execution a little closer to home. Yesterday, the Yahoo! log-in page was taken over by 2010's most talked-about ad character, The Old Spice Guy,

Federated Media Publishing CEO shares his favorite moments We had the pleasure of speaking with John Batelle, the man behind the successful and star-studded Signal LA event. The CEO and founder of Federated Media Publishing artfully moderated the day's best sessions. After a well-deserved cocktail, he shared his highlights from the eventful event. More on that "bomb" thrown by Jason Calacanis from Mahalo .

5 expert tips for creating compelling content The speaker lineup at the first Federated Media event in Southern California was, well, sooo LA. With a VIP list filled with social media celebrities like host John Battelle, Arianna Huffington, and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone-and actual celebrity will.i.am fresh off his Super Bowl half-time performance"there was no shortage of Hollywood wattage at Signal LA. Amidst of all the glitter,

A new Yahoo! mobile experience for consumers and advertisers Livestand from Yahoo! is about to change the digital ad game for good. It's no secret that tablets and mobiles are dramatically changing the way people consume content. You could make the argument that print itself is undergoing its biggest revolution since Johannes Gutenburg invented moveable type, and it's a revolution for consumers, advertisers and publishers. And Yahoo! is in the vanguard. Livestand is Yahoo!

It's a "Web of objects," says Yahoo! chief scientist The future of search on Yahoo! is a "Web of objects," not merely an aggregation of URLs. So says Yahoo! Chief Scientist Raghu Ramakrishnan in a recent interview with Media Post's Laurie Sullivan. "Ramakrishnan defines [Yahoo! search] as a database of recognizable concepts, such as Julia Roberts or the city of Cupertino, Calif.," writes Sullivan.

As we announced in October 2010, we are getting ready to launch a new version of Yahoo! Search BOSS in the coming months and will be closing the current version this summer. We are now pleased to provide further details to help developers prepare for the transition, and are planning to provide specific technical documentation by March 1 st 2011, prior to releasing the new BOSS. The new BOSS service will enable "Search in the Cloud," serving a robust set of web,

The blog team offers its reviews of the spots that soared and soured In this Age of the DVR, the annual Super Bowl broadcast is the rarest of animals: A national TV broadcast during which viewers look forward to watching the ads, and even watch them again if they like them. In fact, in the Yahoo! offices today, there was more water cooler talk about the commercials themselves than about the Packers' exciting win. Of course,

More cars, more stars )Bieber!(, and how brands plan to win the ad game in 2011 Wanna know the advertising meme for Super Bowl XLV? Then turn the TV off and send out a status alert. Some of the most creative projects agencies are strategizing for brand clients this year are taking place off network. Mercedes, Audi, Bud Lite, Kia, Coke and others are beefing up those gone-in-30-seconds, $3 million ad buys and stretching them into a week,

Just in time for the Super Bowl, Snoop Dogg teaches us the basics of the 7-Layer Dip If there's one must-have munchy for a Super Bowl viewing party it's got to be chips, and really, what are chips without dip? In this two-minute online ad for Pepsi Max, the latest "Cooking with Snoop" segment has rapper/actor Snoop Dogg showing his "basic program" for building the perfect seven-layer dip for the big game. Clad in apron and sunglasses,

This week: Kenneth Cole's whale of a fail, the first Super Bowl hashtag, The Daily, Twitter founder nowhere to be found, and Gladwell sends Twitterverse into tizzy 1. Best Twitter Fail: Kenneth Cole First Anderson Cooper is attacked by a pro-Mubarak mob in Egypt. Then footwear impresario Kenneth Cole takes a beating on Twitter for an insensitive tweet about Egypt . Adding insult to injury, within hours, there was a hashtag mocking the incident ) #KennethColeTweets (,

Why moms go online Last summer, Yahoo! Insights released an in-depth study on how marketers can connect with wo men online based on their needs . Our team of researchers recently took a closer look at why women with children go online. They found that the Internet provides moms with an outlet for escape and entertainment, as well as a tool to socialize and gather product information. 73% of moms say they go online to escape from their everyday lives.

Yahoo!'s Mitch Spolan talks online gridiron ad tactics "As the Super Bowl approaches, so do the time-honored ads that will accompany it," writes Chris Crum on WebProNews. "Advertisers aren't just turning to the game itself to capitalize, however. Many are turning to the Web to get some mileage out of the event." They certainly are.

Yahoo!'s Alex Linde helps show the way This is undoubtedly the year when mobile marketing will take center stage. Android and iPhone alone are hooking up some 450,000 customers a day to the mobile Web. But advertisers and agencies are still confused when confronted with developing hook-worthy creative on the small screen. Never mind. Help is on the way. Mobile Marketer recently released its "Classic Guide to Mobile Creative,

Say hello to the new Yahoo! AdLabs, home of the advertising data miners Earlier today, Yahoo! announced the creation of Yahoo! AdLabs and I'm really excited to be leading this vital new team. I'm pleased to be able to use the Yahoo! Advertising Blog to introduce myself, describe AdLab's mission, and tell you a little bit about our plans for 2011. I joined Yahoo! in 2000 to kick-start the data mining group. In the years since, we've launched Yahoo!