Yahoo migrates its advertising tech infrastructure to the cloud, leveraging AWS’s industry-leading technologies to innovate digital experiences for leading brands and publishers

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Yahoo has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud provider for its advertising technology business Yahoo Ad Tech. Building on its longtime relationship with AWS, Yahoo Ad Tech is migrating all of its advertising technology workloads—including its media-buying and supply-side platforms, analytics, and identity solutions and products—from its on-premises data centers to AWS. The migration is part of the business’s ongoing digital transformation strategy to reduce IT infrastructure costs, transform its advertising business operations, and develop more tailored and immersive solutions to help brands connect with their audiences.

Improving Scale, Inventory, and Effectiveness for Advertisers and Agencies

Yahoo Ad Tech reaches more than 540 million people worldwide through its advertising software platform that gives advertising publishers, brands, and agencies the ability to upload creative and automate media-buying across an inventory of mobile, web, and TV channels. The Yahoo Ad Tech platform uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute-optimized instances, powered by AWS-designed processors, to provide publishers, advertising agencies, and brand customers with insights on real-time advertising performance. This reduces the time it takes to deliver the insights advertisers need to reach the right audiences at the right times and in the right formats.

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“The world’s leading media and digital advertising companies rely on AWS as their cloud provider because we help them deliver performance and drive real growth. We’re excited to help Yahoo accelerate its migration to the cloud and bring innovative solutions that help advertisers serve customers all over the world.”

Increasing Advertising Performance and Revenues for Publishers

In addition to giving brands a platform to reach audiences, the Yahoo Ad Tech platform offers media owners and publishers an ad-decisioning engine to help attract advertisers and manage their ad business. AWS’s proven global infrastructure and extensive portfolio of cloud capabilities—including analytics, compute, machine learning (ML), serverless, and storage—will enable Yahoo to rapidly innovate new features for its ad tech platform. Yahoo will help its publisher partners add measurement capabilities, optimize real-time ad-bidding, and hone ad inventory and effectiveness to determine the best mix of advertising while also attracting new brands.

As part of its migration to the cloud, Yahoo Ad Tech is moving its central data platform to AWS to improve advertising effectiveness, personalization, and engagement for its advertiser and publishing customers. Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Yahoo Ad Tech will construct a centralized data lake to store hundreds of petabytes of data. The data lake will enable Yahoo Ad Tech to break down data silos and tap into AWS analytics services, including Amazon EMR (AWS’s industry-leading cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools) and Amazon Athena (an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data). This will support rapid analysis of data from a variety of sources to understand advertising trends, target audiences, and deliver ad performance insights across its operations. Yahoo Ad Tech plans to use Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service for building, training, and deploying ML models in the cloud and at the edge) to streamline its ML pipeline, which today contains thousands of models, and deepen the company’s ability to predict advertising spends, ad inventory, and the effectiveness of ad formats.

To expedite cloud adoption for Yahoo Ad Tech and develop new advertising solutions, Yahoo is providing employees with cloud skills training using the AWS Designated Virtual Trainer (DVT) program. Yahoo is on track to conduct more than 50 instructor-led classes in 2022 with a goal of providing 2,000 IT employees with foundational cloud training over the next two years. These classes will help employees develop skills in application development, data management, and security to support Yahoo’s migration goals and drive innovation at scale.

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“By harnessing the power of AWS, we’ll be able to move faster and give our customers what they value most—advertising solutions that provide the right combination of performance, audiences, and revenue growth,” said Aaron Lake, senior vice president of Platforms Engineering and chief information officer at Yahoo. “Running all of Yahoo Ad Tech on AWS provides us with a broad portfolio of world-class services that will allow us to help advertisers achieve the returns they want by providing them with precise audience targeting, while our ad publisher customers are able to scale and monetize their ad space.”

“Yahoo is a digital pioneer and a trusted partner for the world’s biggest brands,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS. “The world’s leading media and digital advertising companies rely on AWS as their cloud provider because we help them deliver performance and drive real growth. We’re excited to help Yahoo accelerate its migration to the cloud and bring innovative solutions that help advertisers serve customers all over the world.”