First Peek at Yahoo's APT Dashboard

Jen: We have here the first look at the APT dashboard from Yahoo, the Web-based solution that promises ease of use, introduced today.

One of these whiz-bang things this platform does is cut way back on the number of steps involved in placing an online ad. Yahoo needs this to succeed as much as newspapers. Fortune's Devin Leonard makes that case here.

Sue Decker, Yahoo's president, explained this morning that placing an online ad can take 30 different steps from when the ad is conceived to when it runs on site. Some request for proposals are actually FAXED. One of APT's advantages, claims Yahoo, is that newspapers can spend less time on ad management and more time on oh, selling ads!

MediaNews Group's Oliver Knowlton sat down with me and explained how much time it saves. The San Jose Mercury News is one of the first newspapers out the gate to launch APT officially tomorrow. The Mercury News was on DoubleClick's DART platform before fully switching over to APT. Advertisers like to see their ad before it goes live usually in a test format. Knowlton said on DART a test run would take about five hours. With APT they got it down to 2.

The APT dashboard is below with a drop down menu in the example.