(Source: Business Wire)

WPP's (NASDAQ:WPPGY) GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)
today announced a partnership to help marketers creatively incorporate
their brands into original online programming. The programs will appear
exclusively throughout Yahoo!'s network of leading media properties
including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment.
"Marketers need big, ground-breaking ideas that engage and delight
consumers, and this partnership with Yahoo! will enable them to create
unique high value relationships," said GroupM Entertainment Worldwide
CEO Peter Tortorici, who will administer the partnership for GroupM.
GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! will work together to identify
advertisers, develop creative concepts that map media content with an
advertiser's messaging, and produce the content for each program. Yahoo!
will also promote these branded programs to targeted audiences in
channels across its network.
"Yahoo! has a keen understanding of what makes our audience click, and
this partnership will help advertisers develop deeper connections with
our users," said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo!'s senior vice president, North
American revenue and market development. "Furthermore, Yahoo! can
continue to build on its successful portfolio of the Internet's
most-watched original programming by tapping into GroupM's incredible
creative development talent."
Margaret Clerkin, GroupM's director of digital assets, will assist
Tortorici in overseeing the company's involvement, and Erika Nardini,
Yahoo!'s vice president of packaging, will be the representative from
Yahoo!.
Both GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! have extensive experience creating
and distributing successful, award-winning programming that provides
proven return on investment for their clients.
For example, Yahoo's TechTicker (http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker),
with Scottrade as the advertiser, is the most-viewed business and
investing program online averaging more than 350,000 streams per day.
Another popular Yahoo! show, Sports Minute (http://sports.yahoo.com/sportsminute),
was developed for client Dunkin' Donuts and averages 175,000 streams per
day.
GroupM Entertainment unit Mindshare Entertainment, meanwhile, created In
the Motherhood, a series of original webisodes for Mindshare clients
Sprint and Unilever's Suave that was later picked up by ABC Television
and developed into the first ever prime time situation comedy to be spun
off from an online series developed by a media services agency.
ABOUT GROUPM
GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It
serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus,
MediaCom, Mediaedge:cia and MindShare. Our primary purpose is to
maximize the performance of WPP's media communications agencies on
behalf of our clients, our shareholders and our people by operating as a
parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as
trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool
development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that
comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with
leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent
application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading,
innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive
advantage to our clients and our companies.
ABOUT YAHOO!
Yahoo! attracts hundreds of millions of users every month through its
innovative technology and engaging content and services, making it one
of the most trafficked Internet destinations and a world class online
media company. Yahoo!'s vision is to be the center of people's online
lives by delivering personally relevant, meaningful Internet
experiences. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more
information, visit http://pressroom.yahoo.com
or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal (http://yodel.yahoo.com).
A service of YellowBrix, Inc.