The Challenge

Overture - the global search advertising pioneer - was preparing to launch its first Asia market (Japan) and needed Asia-specific technical leadership in the field. There were local market partners to support, internal clients in need of details, and technical teams in US headquarters in need of regional updates. They wanted a dedicated employee to lead all these efforts.

The Solution

The Asia markets starting with Japan were successfully launched, with virtually no hiccups. Japanese communication was provided, along with some technical translation.

Outside-the-box thinking and expertise in the APIs, partners' strengths and weaknesses, and internationalization issues, evolved to solutions to gain and protect tens of millions of dollars annually. New opportunities for partners' text ads were found, implementation concerns quickly resolved.

Text ad products and tools were localized and enhanced. Implementations worked with XML, Javascript, and HTML format ad products; HowTo guides, XSL and sample codes were produced and localized.

On the service technical operations front, monitoring tools and alert systems were built, maintained, and applied, mostly in perl. Emergency support was also provided: incidents were investigated, escalated and quickly resolved.

Results

Some of the biggest regional partners, including Yahoo! Japan, Naver of Korea, Infoseek and Yahoo! Taiwan, quickly grew from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars (USD) in annual revenues from Search Advertising.

Partner service impacts were minimized through the emergency incident support provided.

The company, a search advertising pioneer, became a strategic core strength for one of its major global partners and was acquired. It continued to have leading market shares in most of the Asia markets for several years.