Cheaper? Easier?!??? Those words are the lifeblood of the advertising community.

Now Chief Executive Jerry Yang is using them to tout Yahoo’s new advertising system, telling Reuters in an interview that the so-called APT will make life better for advertisers and publisher.

“This system allows cross-selling between sales forces, it allows us to have visibility of what pricing is happening and where,” Yang said in the interview.

What Yahoo wants is a system as efficient for online display advertising as the one run by Google in search advertising. APT will roll out in the fourth quarter, and from early 2009, will place Yahoo’s own inventory on the system as well as other publishers and advertisers. Yahoo has teamed with nearly 800 newspaper websites.

But can they pull it off? That remains to be seen. As Ben Schachter, analyst at UBS says, “Given Yahoo’s scale and position as the leader in online display advertising, it is Yahoo’s position to lose. The problem is, given Yahoo’s execution history over the past few years, we are afraid that they could lose it.”

What do ad executives think? The New York Times spoke to one…

If Yahoo can use its data well, said Darren Herman, the head of digital media at the Media Kitchen agency, “they can target, hopefully, much more effectively, and when I’m calling up for an advertiser, they can give me the exact audience I want.”

Mr. Herman said, however, that Yahoo had made promising announcements for years, “but then it gets lost.”

 We’ll see if Yahoo can make good on this on.    

Keep an eye on: 

• News Corp’s MySpace unveiled a long-expected joint venture with all four major music companies in a bid to compete with Apple Inc’s market-leading iTunes store (Reuters)
• Publisher Scholastic Corp Thursday said its quarterly loss widened from a year-ago period that included sales of the blockbuster final Harry Potter book (Reuters)
• Fantasy sports, where fans select real athletes for make-believe teams, are exploding onto new platforms like smart phones and social networking sites, grabbing the attention of advertisers, wireless carriers and software companies (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters) 
 

Whose kids are these, anyway? A new survey released by Scholastic Corp, the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, shows that book publishers, newspaper proprietors and massive forest logging concerns have a future:

75 percent of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper,” and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

And if you think that that dastardly Internet is going to turn the minds of children to pulp, guess again, the study says:

Kids who go online to extend the reading experience - by going to book or author websites or connecting with other readers - are more likely to read books for fun every day.

To break it down a bit, we see that boys tend to prefer the Internet for “fun” reading (54 percent vs. 46 percent) while girls prefer books (63 percent vs. 37 percent).  And two-thirds of children believe that fun reading will be a primarily digital pastime in 10 years, as opposed, we suppose, to MANDATORY reading, which will still be on paper.

(Photo: Reuters)