Yahoo! Ad Change: Did Millard Jump or Was She Pushed?

Yahoo announced last weekend that it will merge its search and display advertising sales teams in the U.S. in an effort to streamline media buys for customers who want to advertise in a variety of formats, from search and graphical ads to videos.

Senior vice president of Yahoo! Search sales David Karnstedt will lead the new integrated ad department as head of North American sales. Wenda Millard, the company’s former chief U.S. sales officer, has left Yahoo! and assumed the post of president of media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

“The future of advertising isn’t about choosing between search and display, but about leveraging the breadth of advertising products to more effectively reach your customers with the right message, in the right context, at the right time, and on the right platform,” said Gregory Coleman, Yahoo! executive vice president of global sales, in a release.

“By taking a more holistic approach to advertising sales, Yahoo! will become a more consultative seller, which should make buying complete solutions easier for our customers across Yahoo! and our partner network,” Karnstedt said in the release.

Comments like that make Millard’s replacement seem like a strategic move at Yahoo! The restructuring of its U.S. ad sales team comes less than a week after Yahoo! replaced CEO Terry Semel with a team of co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO and Sue Decker as president. At that time, the company also warned that continuing weakness in display ad sales would be one factor dampening second-quarter growth.

But in the days after the change, several commentators have questioned which came first, her departure or Karnstedt’s appointment. The suggestion has been made that Millard was leaving and Yahoo! made a pre-emptive PR strike to make it look as if shifting her to one side was a planned and controlled response to slumping display ad sales.

For example, Wall Street Journal correspondent Kara Swisher pointed to a June 19 post in D, the WSJ digital business blog, that named Millard as one of the Yahoo! executives likely to depart next following the removal of Semel as CEO. “I had no idea that the struggling company was that quick about anything,” she said in a follow-up post on Monday.

“Millard’s departure—which seems to be a case of her looking for and getting another job, all while Yahoo! was rejiggering its approach to ad sales—was handled with no grace and much confusion,” Swisher wrote. “And that’s just how the company handled the departure of CEO Terry Semel last week and its reorganization before that.”

In fact, the timing of the ad sales consolidation announcement was somewhat odd, with the release appearing 1:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon. In the Western hemisphere, at least, you really don’t release good news on Sunday.

The release also includes a left-handed compliment to Millard from Coleman, to whom she reported: “While Wenda was a big contributor to our success in the past, the industry has shifted and requires a different set of skills to take the business forward.” This faint praise makes the announcement look somewhat more like an attempt to spin her departure as a planned and purposeful response to changing business conditions.

Yahoo! has seen a steady drumbeat of executive departures over the last year, including COO Dan Rosenwieg and chief technical officer Farzad Nazem. Ten of the 26 managers listed on the company Web site a year ago have since moved on, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a Monday research note, Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Sandeep Aggarwal expressed concern that management turnover at Yahoo! “can slow down the company’s overall execution capabilities and weaken its ability to pursue new opportunities.”