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Aug. 30, 2007

In Yahoo's latest reorganization by President Susan Decker, Gregory Coleman, the company's top sales executive is leaving the company.

Coleman was Yahoo's executive v.p. of global sales and wants "to pursue other opportunities," Decker said in a memo sent to employees late yesterday.

Overall, Coleman will play a "transitional role" until February of next year she added.

Coleman will be replaced by Hillary Schneider, an executive v.p. in charge of Yahoo's local markets and commerce unit.

Schneider is to head up the newly created Global Partner Solutions unit. The division will include U.S. sales, marketing and business development.

In Decker's memo, she said the restructuring will allow Yahoo to strike up relationships with other site publishers and will offer the company a far wider range of advertising inventory to sell to advertisers, ad networks and advertising agencies abroad.

Decker added "we will be able to more quickly identify and better secure the ad inventory that best meets our advertisers' objectives."

Last month, recently appointed CEO Jerry Yang said he would deliver a new strategic plan for the company within about a hundred days and that will help the company respond to rapid changes in consumer behavior on the Internet and competition from rival Google, the top provider of search advertising.

Overall, the Global Partner Solutions unit will be in charge of sales of all advertising formats, including search, corporate brand display, video, mobile, paid listings, etc.

Yahoo's new Global Partner Solutions unit will also serve customers of all sizes, including marketing to small business customers, Decker's memo described.

However, business development deals for Yahoo's content division (Web properties that range from music to news to sports to finance) and its mobile business unit will continue to operate separately, according to the memo.

For the past 15 months, Yahoo has been seeking to expand its business by delivering its media and advertising to businesses off Yahoo's network of many Internet properties.

Such deals include one with eBay that will sell advertising to the online auction's sites, and another deal with Comcast to sell online display and video advertising for the Comcast.net site.

Susan Decker also added in her employee memo that Schneider, the executive who spearheaded Yahoo's recent advertising sales partnership with various newspaper publishing groups, will be in charge of advertising sales, Yahoo's publisher network (YPN), corporate partnerships and the company's job recruitment service HotJobs.

Coleman, a 25-year-veteran of the media and publishing industries, joined Yahoo six years ago, and oversaw the expansion of the company's online advertising sales into a $6 billion business from a $600 million one when he initially started at Yahoo in 2001.

In a move to help shore up publishers suffering from declining classified ad sales and under Schneider's initiative, Yahoo has set up a consortium for newspaper publishers to sell online advertising through hundreds of newspaper sites.

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Source: Yahoo News