Yahoo Launches Ad Products in Southeast Asia, Focuses on Mobile

At an event this afternoon in Singapore, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) has rolled out a whole bunch of advertising platform products for the first time in Southeast Asia. The mobile-oriented ads are, says Yahoo, multimedia, interactive and well-targeted. They launch immediately in Singapore, and will come to Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam “in the coming months.”

Yahoo reaches over 200 million folks across Asia as a huge publisher of content, and it’s that kind of captive audience that it’s offering up to brands today. And so, for the first time in the region, the somewhat beleaguered U.S. web company is making available three of its key ad products:

1. Clickable mobile video ads – These tap-to-video ads can take over an entire screen or expand to certain sizes, working within phones and tablets. Yahoo claims they they “encourage consumers to interact” and “outperform traditional video ads by 3:1.”

2. Smart ads – These can be optimized for each user, and could include something like hyper-targeted local offers. These initially launched way back in 2007.

3. Targeting ads – Lastly, Yahoo’s targeted ads can reach select groups or demographics “based on interest and content consumed within Yahoo.”

The focus on mobile by Yahoo is understandable since home internet penetration across Asia as a whole stands at a fairly low 24 percent, compared to mobile penetration of 74 percent – with many of those phones being used online.