Answer engines shrink the audience and raise its value. Content alone stops being the product. Point of view is the moat.

Sanchez got started trying to solve the problem of helping nonprofits build public service announcements and reach their audience on television, communicating messages that really mattered, and tapping into the explosion of independent filmmakers who suddenly had digital tools at their fingertips to make amazing content. That led to democratising video publishing in a web context, and then to solving the monetisation problem for short-form video. One thing led to another.

Yahoo was the original guide. There were people scouring the internet, making sense of it and organising the websites people might want by category. If anything that problem is more complex today. There is a lot of really incredible content out there, but you have to sort through a ton of chaff to get to the real nuggets. The role now is to be that trusted guide wherever your passion points are, helping you make sense of the digital wilderness and get to the heart of what you are trying to accomplish.

Yahoo reaches nine in 10 Americans every month, by Sanchez's account, and that tremendous scale is part of what attracted him to the opportunity to come in and be involved in taking the business private. The starting set of properties was unbelievable: Finance, Sports, Mail, News, Search, Weather. These are people's core passions and daily habits, and Yahoo plays a vital role in their digital lives.

The measure is not raw reach. It is how well the business helps people accomplish their goals, what the core user needs are that make each property unique, and whether engagement is rising because Yahoo is doing a better job of meeting them. Depth of engagement and increased user behaviour are what get the team excited. When the business was taken private in 2021, AI did not have the focus it has now, and gas has since been put on that fire. From there, adjacent activities become visible: the things users try to do constantly in Mail, or search for repeatedly, guide the next utilities worth building.

What consumers expect when they research or ask a question has evolved considerably in the last year or two. People expect the work to be taken out of the process and an answer delivered, rather than a set of links as one more step on the journey. It has to be done with high confidence and grounded in waypoints back to where the information came from, which gives users more confidence. Sanchez expects this to open up even more inquiry, because people realise they have a powerful companion that can answer far more questions and start facilitating steps in getting things done. He does not frame it as the evolution of traditional search at all.

Yahoo is 31 years old, a brand many people grew up with and one recognised globally. Sanchez treats that as a responsibility, and as a starting advantage: people know a bit more about who Yahoo is and what it stands for than they may with other players. With people asking AI sensitive and near confidential questions, platforms that are world class in user privacy and take those responsibilities seriously will be essential to where this goes.

Publishers creating content must have the agency to decide how that content is used. If it is provided to a model to train on, that must happen in a way they are fully in control of and are compensated for properly. The industry has a way to go on what the compensation model should look like, though there are good early experiments being tested. The ruling got a lot right by giving publishers control without the fear of any decrease in how they show up in other forms.

Publishers carry a responsibility of their own: to create content that is valuable and adds premium value to the answers a model generates. Expertise, recency and relevancy are what make something worth the economic trade. For so long the focus was on getting the click from search into a publisher site, and the result is a lot of duplicative content and brands diluted by chasing distribution. The conversation plays out on both sides, control and quality together.

What counts as a great audience is going to be much more qualified. Audiences get smaller and intent gets higher. As content becomes better and more differentiated, you may not reach the same number of people, but the conversion, interest and expertise of those who do arrive clears a much higher bar. Publishers should stop thinking about the aggregate audience full of passing consumption and unintended clicks, and focus on people genuinely there to go deeper on a problem or a product decision.

Take a product review. The people reaching it are typically much further down the research path than before. Instead of 100 clicks where 60 churn out quickly, it is the 40 that remain, many arriving because the new engines gave them the quick snapshot and now, facing a big purchase, they want to read a couple of articles. The opportunity is to build a different experience around that: comparison guides that stack products on the metrics the review team tests, or a store locator mapping retailers in the neighbourhood. You add utility because you already know the audience is high intent, so a higher percentage will use it. Content creators move from making content to providing richer capability around it. The audience is smaller and the density of value far higher.

At a macro level the trends move towards outcomes: bringing Yahoo data and advertiser data together for better business results, understanding where consumers are in their journey and meeting them with the right message at the right time, and closing the loop to see where the transaction happens. All of it serves being more directly engaged as business partners and delivering return on ad spend that works. What excites Sanchez most about this chapter is the move from scale, volume and tonnage towards being useful, and asking whether a core user need is being solved.

There is more curiosity and engagement among marketers than Sanchez has seen in 20 years in advertising, with a tremendous amount of individual experimentation producing results faster than he expected. The rate of change in workflow is stunning. The more you invest in a shared knowledge base and repeatable skills, the more you can take the human out of tactical workflow, and that frees up room for strategy. There are also non-intuitive connections between data points that nobody had the time, or perhaps the intuition, to see, and the combination of human strategist and machine insight will lead to richer outcomes.

Being the trusted guide to the digital wilderness matters as much for Yahoo News as it does for the Yahoo DSP. Knowing where to buy with confidence, and how to bring data to that decision to get the most performance out of a media investment, is a place where Yahoo has a unique role because it is both a scaled publisher and a demand and decision platform. They are very different businesses, one B2B and cross-channel, one consumer, and they interplay around the same core point.

Sanchez has always enjoyed platform businesses, because the scale brings better outcomes to everyone involved. Get the core foundational principles right and you can build product teams focused on the specific user needs of whatever they are working on, and that is where the magic happens. You accept the constraints, you gain a standardised foundation across the business, and then you can do exceptional things, whether that is being the assistant general manager recommending trades in the Fantasy app or recommending optimisations to a media plan on the DSP.

The brands that stood the test of time did so because they had a point of view, a perspective or tastemaker position people relied on, and that came from what the brand stood for rather than access to distribution. The ability to make something has never been more powerful. Creating software is nearly fungible, so the game becomes bringing unique data and perspective together with an idea and using it to connect an audience. The media companies that survive will build real utility around a genuinely unique point of view and connect with a deeply engaged, almost certainly smaller, core audience. It might be a filter of kindness traveller on top of all the hotels in the world. B2B is a phenomenal category for exactly this reason: those brands crafted a niche in their fields.

Is AI making people better communicators? Certainly not today. It is raising the volume of communication without the thought behind it. Reviewing 20 pages is much harder than reviewing two, and it has never been easier to generate 20 pages. Sanchez expects a move towards refinement that better expresses ideas, and points to the difference between asking a tool to write a document and using it to learn, connect and align, which creates a feedback loop towards better communication. On differentiation, personality is one vector for B2B brands, community is the harder one, and where there is real authenticity, special things can happen.

CMO tenure, and the role the chief financial officer and procurement now play, all push towards outcomes, and growth expectations on companies today are tremendous. Brands get reminded in that process about brand equity and reinvesting at the top of the funnel, and Sanchez expects this to be as much a creative decision as a financial one. Change tends to come from the outlier or rebel company that invests in brand strategy and drives a turnaround, with Stanley as the example that comes to his mind, and as those stories get told the question becomes how to emulate them rather than whether the percentage mix is right. He also cautions that what looks like a marketing decision often reflects growth expectations against the Street, activist investors or competitive pressure. Above all, it starts with recognising that nothing is the same today.

Sanchez has been reading historical biography, particularly around the industrial revolution, as a frame of reference for how uncomfortable electricity and the combustion engine once were, and he rates the network of people swapping ideas as a live learning channel inside the company. He admires how cohesively Google connects its ecosystem across a very broad portfolio. His advice to anyone starting out is to roll up your sleeves, take the project, challenge preconception, and experiment with tools that would feel unnatural to people who have done the same thing for a long time, sticking with it and refining until the output is remarkable.