Anyone whose business touches online advertising will want to read Sue Decker’s blog post summary of her and Jerry Yangs “fireside chat” at the IAB’s annual meeting. She actually posted a recap to the Yahoo! corp blog “Yodel Anecdotal,” which is the first posting by a company leader in quite some time. It also answers some of the recent chatter about Sue’s non-presence lately.

I’ll give Sue and Jerry the benefit of the doubt and assume even if this is posturing towards Microsoft’s desires, that Yahoo! very much needs to be in the place Decker describes they will be. She says their “approach is as different to current advertising platforms as the DVR was to VCRs”

Apparently this new platform is already being demoed (though the link on the demo goes to the wrong page) so this may be more than 2012 vaporware talk. Honestly, this is the service Yahoo! should have launched in 2003 instead of trying to become an LA entertainment company. It’s late in the game to start cornering the rich-media online advertising market, but the reality is it is still wide open for the taking, considering how many players have been asleep at the wheel since the bubble burst.

Her starting position is that advertisers and publishers are currently forced to rely on a wide and disparate set of tools to connect advertiser with prospective customer. I heartily agree. Huge volumes of person hours are lost in the process of making, running, and reporting of ad campaigns.

She then states that Yahoo! as the top web publisher, top ad displayer, and second in search is uniquely qualified to bring advertiser and publisher together in a far streamlined process. She’s also pretty keen on their Right Media acquisition which I’m still not sold on.

She places a very big value in targeted serving, but not in the vogue-ish manner of advertiser to web-user, but rather it sounds like she is talking about the best advertiser serving on the most appropriate publisher, which I think is much better. We’ll see, but I’m am not sold at all on the hype about targetting ad serves to individual users. There is simply not enough diversity in a single users interests, nor enough advertisers within their interests to make it more cost effective. However, if you bring together all the demographics of a single publisher’s user base, you’ll display a wider array of ads that will work at a higher percentage.