‘We don’t care if you don’t use our UX anymore’: Yahoo recasts its DSP as a data backbone for the agentic world

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If that still sounds backwards, put it this way: Yahoo is recasting its DSP less as a place marketers go, and more as infrastructure their systems can plug into. So instead of logging into the DSP’s interface, clicking through menus and troubleshooting campaigns, marketers would deploy their own software agents and internal tools to talk directly to Yahoo’s ad platform and run campaigns for them.

In short, Yahoo becomes the plumbing. The marketer’s agent becomes the interface.

“We don’t care if you don’t use our UX anymore,” said Adam Roodman, gm of Yahoo DSP.

Because the real wager, he argued, sits below the interface, in the identity graph and data the DSP plugs into. Strip that away and there’s little moat beyond workflow habit and certification lock-in. With it, Yahoo is positioning itself as the consumer identity and commerce data spine advertisers’ buying algorithms can depend on as they start to move away from the more traditional, off-the-shelf solutions.

“Having that deterministic base of 230 million in the U.S. has never been more relevant,” said Roodman.

That base is anchored in Yahoo’s own network of logged-in consumer properties, from Yahoo Mail, Sports, Finance and News to a wider portfolio of content, where users authenticate, transact, search, read and watch at scale. Those first-party relationships give Yahoo a direct view into who people are and how they behave inside its environments and — through identity partnerships with other media owners — the ability to recognize and reach those same people (or people who are similar) across the open web without leaning on eroding IP signals or third-party cookies.

That matters most in CTV where IP-based identity is becoming increasingly unreliable, undermined by VPN usage, address resale, device churn and the way streaming audiences move across networks and locations.

“For a very long time, a lot of DSPs built their graph off of that IP address because they didn’t have the authenticated user,” said Roodman. “We don’t have to do that — tie a whole bunch of IP addresses together to figure out who that person is because we have the authenticated user.” 

Live sports is becoming Yahoo’s proving ground for this advantage.

As Roodman explained: “In live sports the most common metric advertisers measure us on is cost per unique household. It’s what we’re benchmarked against in head-to-head tests. Fees matter, obviously. But if you’re targeting the wrong household because you’re relying on an IP address that’s been muddled by VPNs or someone using the same network, your cost per unique household goes up. Ours goes down, because we still know who that household actually is. That’s why live sports has become such an important proving ground for us.”

The same advantage is now being extended into commerce media. Yahoo has added partners such as Dollar General Media Network and DoorDash to pull shopper intent and transaction signals into its DSP. That lets advertisers not just impressions but households with real purchase behavior tied to merchant platforms, and in doing so apply the same identity spine that stabilizes CTV buying to commerce-driven campaigns.

Strip it back and this is Yahoo trying to extract maximum value from the leverage it still has in a DSP market dominated by three gravitational forces: Google, Amazon and The Trade Desk. Clearly, there’s real risk in this strategy. Amazon is already offering free, head-to-head testing of its DSP against rivals, a tactic designed to pull more budgets into its orbit. Yahoo’s effort to make it easier to work with could just as easily make it easier to leave — and, in the process, amplify Amazon’s gravitational pull. 

But Yahoo is not really competing on dashboards or workflow anymore. It is angling to become something more infrastructural: the default consumer identity and commerce data backbone for machine-driven advertising. Agentic AI becomes the automation layer that makes that backbone usable at scale. In that framing, the DSP is less the product than the delivery system. The asset is the identity spine underneath it. 

“The game of having aggressive head to heads and authoring annual JBPs (joint business plans] or endeavors is getting a lot more coverage now but it’s always been part of the process and so is something we’re already accustomed to,” said Roodman. 

It’s still early but marketers are starting to treat Yahoo DSP as a one to watch. They see its bet on a future where DSP becomes interchangeable, and data becomes the real moat, as increasingly plausible. 

One of those is packaging and pulp manufacturer Georgia-Pacific. The Yahoo DSP is its main one, ahead of rivals Amazon DSP and Google’s DV360 in terms of ad dollars spent. The reasons: lower cost economics, platform modernization and service responsiveness as the key drivers. 

“Internally, our POV is that the entire DSP landscape is a commoditized industry, which has basically access to the same inventory,” said Paras Shah, senior director of digital media at Georgia-Pacific at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans last month. “We have found Yahoo DSP as being the lowest cost provider in the industry.”