Boston, MA 06/25/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer, apologized to attendees at the advertiser festival organized by Interpublic Group at Cannes Lions, France. The executive was late for the important dinner that brought together key advertisers that the company has been making frantic efforts to bring to its fold with the aim of boosting revenue and profits. Mayer was late by two hours for the event, and the incident has attracted widespread criticism.
The Cannes Lions event was attended by executives from other heavyweight Internet companies such as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), AOL Inc (NYSE:AOL) and others. In her apology, Mayer stated that her lateness had nothing to do with slighting the attendees.
Commitment to advertisers
Following her lateness at the important event, critics of Mayer questioned her commitment to build a strong relationship with advertisers given that the company has fallen behind rivals in advertisement revenues.
Since taking over the reins at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) in 2012, Mayer has been under pressure to turnaround the company. Although the California-based company has a rich user data that is important for targeted ads, the company has made little progress to keep up the pace with rivals Google Inc and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), which control the lion’s share of the online advertisement revenue.
Although the company showed signs of progress in the latest quarter, its growth is far from favorable because estimates by analysts project that revenue growth in the company will be less than 5 percent over the next three years. As such, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) needs to boost its relationship with advertisers so that it can increase its revenue.
Heading there
As if to give credence to her commitment to increase revenue performance in the advertisement segment, Mayer is building a breaking news team in the company, which will make it a legitimate news platform and entice more advertisers. Towards that end, the company has hired high-profile journalists in recent times.
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is apparently pushing to tap native advertising dollars. That is whereby ads are placed within the content, which makes building a vibrant news team a key investment for the company.
