If you’ve noticed, now as Yahoo! Search Marketing, the move has been to make the guidelines easier to understand and more like Google. Although search marketing should be essentially a service-oriented business, there was a lack of concern for the customers as compared to more traditional service jobs that I had worked at, such as retail sales or food service. This is why later Yahoo! would make a move to be more “customer-centric.”
Yet Panama also showed how some of that arrogance that came from forging a new type of service and business remained. How long do you think the managers were ideating over what to call the ads—things we once called ad titles and descriptions? They came up with the label, "creatives" (among other things). That didn’t last long. What customer service person or marketing person wants to waste time explaining to a customer what a creative is and why you’re calling an advertisement a creative?
Kevin Lee of ClickZ Network looked at Panama in September of 2006 and had this to say:
Phase one of Panama is an updated DTC that allows for a more flexible Ad Group structure, permitting a single creative (or group of creative units) to be shared by a basket of keywords. Yahoo! even goes as far as to expand the targeting definition beyond keywords to reflect that the DTC (like Google and MSN) is evolving beyond search. Yahoo! calls the keywords "targets" in one presentation, but in the DTC they're still called "keywords" within the publicly shared tabs, so there's no need to start freaking out yet. When one thinks about marketing, much non-search marketing is really about reaching a target market: home buyers, music enthusiasts, in-market auto buyers, new moms, and so forth.If you look at the current information about Yahoo! Search Marketing, such as their introduction and their guidelines, words like targets for keywords and creatives for ads or ad creatives are no longer used.
By March 2007, some bloggers had a list of complaints, including StraightUpSearch.com's post with a wish list that included dayparting, ad position reporting by time frame, time of day and time zone specification, along with the ability to choose on which sites you want your ad to appear and which ones you do not.
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