Yahoo! is teaming up with consumer healthcare product manufacturer Kimberly-Clark Corp. in another victory for its recent vertical focus.
A new advertising agreement Yahoo! and Dallas, Texas-based Kimberly-Clark, will see the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based portal distributing health information created and sponsored by Kimberly-Clark, which manufacturers baby products like Huggies, Pull-Ups and GoodNights, as well as family-oriented goods like Kleenex tissues.
Through the deal, Kimberly-Clark will supply Yahoo! with content that includes child-rearing advice and parenting healthcare articles. That content will form the basis of the new Parenting category of Yahoo! Health, in which Kimberly-Clark will become the exclusive advertiser.
Terms were not disclosed of the arrangement.
Kimberly-Clark and its Web site, Parentstages.com, will receive promotion through banner ads across the Parenting category, while buttons and contextual links highlight ParentStages.com and Kimberly-Clark products.
Most importantly, however, Yahoo! will serve as a conduit to pipe content from Parentstages.com to a wider audience of Web users. (The company has existing syndication and distribution agreements with Primedia’s American Baby group, among others.)
“As a leading manufacturer of infant and child care products, we use our understanding of consumer needs to provide parents with reliable and useable information to help in raising their children,” said Dave Deising, marketing director of Infant Care at Kimberly-Clark. “Our agreement with Yahoo! allows us to reach a broader audience on the Internet than ever before.”
The deal represents another win for Yahoo!, which is aiming to cope with the soft online ad market by pitching its vertical sites to advertisers. To date, the company has made a brisk trade in inking movie studios and record labels to ad deals on its Movies and Music/Launch sites, respectively, and air carriers, including British Airways, to agreements with its Yahoo! Travel site.
The agreement also continues efforts by consumer packaged goods manufacturers to increase their efforts online, where new research suggests that women — mothers, especially — spend much of their media-consuming time.
On Tuesday, AOL Time Warner released a study that found that mothers had outpaced teens in terms of the number of hours spent online each week. As a result, the findings suggest that Web media buys could pay off handsomely for CPG firms, since women typically control household spending.
Similarly, Jupiter Media Metrix and NPD Group found last month that mothers’ use of the Web cut into their consumption of traditional media.
