Yahoo! loses! sales! head!

Oh! Noes!

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 25th June 2007 11:31 GMT

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Yahoo! is using the departure of its US head of sales to reorganise its sales department.

In future display and search ad sales will be run from one department. Yahoo! says this is because companies increasingly want to run both campaigns together.

But the search and portal company has seen a stream of departures from senior positions in recent weeks.

Wenda Millard, Yahoo!'s chief sales officer in the US, is leaving Yahoo! to join Martha Stewart's Living Omnimedia group.

David Karnstedt, who previously ran Yahoo!'s search marketing business, now takes over display ads too in a newly-combined department. The company said customers want to both buy search terms and display ad campaigns together.

In a statement Yahoo! said: "Advertisers are increasingly seeking solutions that span a wide variety of ad products, such as search, display and video, that when combined can deliver significantly better results than when used independently."

Yahoo! is pinning a lot on its new ad platform Panama, which launched this month in Europe, to help it beat off competition from Google.

Yahoo!'s chief technology officer, Zod Nazem, left in June along with chief executive, Terry Semel, who had six years at the top of the company. He was replaced by Yahoo!'s co-founder Jerry Yang.

The company has been criticised by shareholders and analysts for lacking focus and not standing up to the challenge of Google. Some believe the company needs to make a big, expensive acquisition to keep in the spirit of Web2.0. It recently bought college sports site Rivals.com.®

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