A Decade of Innovation (2007–2017) at Yahoo!

Gavin spent nearly ten years at Yahoo! evolving from hands-on rich media designer to the leader of the company's advertising innovation team. The journey began as a Visual Designer II, creating rich-media advertising for virtually every major U.S. advertiser by transforming client assets into complex animated banners, video units, page takeovers, expandable units, microsites, sweepstakes, and custom ad integrations within Yahoo Mail, all built and deployed at scale using Yahoo's internal rich-media platform, AdInterax. Promotion to Visual Designer III in January 2013 brought larger projects and cross-platform initiatives, including the Yahoo! Login page project and implementation of new HTML5 mobile ad units through a partnership with Celtra. The final chapter began in February 2015 as Senior Designer and Ad Creative Technology Team Lead, overseeing a multidisciplinary group of designers and developers. In this role, Gavin spearheaded Yahoo's first virtual reality advertising initiatives and led creative integration with Tumblr, designing sponsored pages and native posts to help monetize the platform. By 2016, industry publications were referring to the position as "Senior Design Manager" for Yahoo's Creative Solutions team.

Campaigns That Made Headlines

Some projects stood out from the hundreds of campaigns produced during this era.

Diet Dr Pepper: "Hunt for the Unbelievable" (2011)

The Diet Dr Pepper "Hunt for the Unbelievable" campaign, executed in partnership with ad agency Deutsch LA, transformed the Yahoo homepage into an elaborate interactive story. The concept centered on a Diet Dr Pepper deliveryman attending a support group called "I Exist!", populated by the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, a leprechaun, aliens, and other mythical figures. The premise played on the idea that a truly satisfying diet soda seemed just as unbelievable as those characters, until Diet Dr Pepper proved otherwise.

The Yahoo Creative Solutions team built a rich microsite at dietdrpepperhunt.yahoo.com featuring animated ads where users could help the Diet Dr Pepper guy find missing members of the group in a game-like experience. The campaign included a mix of video, animation, and a $10,000 sweepstakes. The New York Times featured the campaign in their advertising column, recognizing its creative storyline and Yahoo's role in executing it. MediaPost echoed the coverage, emphasizing the "unbelievable characters" concept. Getting a nod from the Times for an online ad campaign in 2011 was fairly rare, indicating that the team had produced something notably creative and demonstrating Yahoo's capability to deliver engaging branded content. This was an early example of Yahoo executing a full "homepage takeover" interactive ad experience.

Oreo Cookies on Yahoo Shine (circa 2012)

For Oreo, Gavin produced a branded custom background and overlay for Yahoo Shine, Yahoo's family and lifestyle vertical. The advertisement skinned the entire page with eye-catching visuals of cookies dunking in milk, animating in response to user interaction. The creative integrated seamlessly with Yahoo's site content, showcasing the Ad Creative Technology team's ability to blend storytelling with the webpage UI. This was one of dozens of high-impact creatives where the advertisement became part of the browsing experience rather than an intrusion upon it.

Marvel's Ant-Man Homepage Takeover (2015)

For Marvel Studios' Ant-Man, Gavin produced a Yahoo homepage takeover featuring the tiny superhero scampering across the Yahoo site interface. The playful creative execution grabbed users' attention by having the miniature hero interact with the familiar elements of Yahoo's homepage, demonstrating how creative animation could transform a standard ad placement into a memorable brand experience.

Discovery Channel Shark Week

Promotional takeovers for media events included a Discovery Channel "Shark Week" theme on Yahoo Entertainment, bringing the annual programming event to life across the entertainment vertical with custom animations and thematic elements.

The Full Scope of Campaign Work

Beyond these highlighted examples, the Yahoo portfolio spanned virtually every industry: consumer packaged goods, entertainment studios, tech companies, and automotive brands. These projects often involved custom animations, video snippets, and dynamic elements animated in Adobe Flash and later Adobe Animate to create engaging experiences. In many cases, the work involved repurposing and augmenting client-provided assets, transforming flat images or TV commercials into interactive rich-media ads tailored specifically for Yahoo's audience. The ability to execute such campaigns ensured that Yahoo's biggest advertising clients received novel ad formats and "one-of-a-kind" creative treatments far beyond standard banner ads.

Pioneering VR Advertising

The most forward-looking work came in the realm of virtual reality and 360-degree content. Drawing on years of experience in panoramic photography, Gavin led Yahoo's effort to create immersive advertising experiences at scale. The team developed 360-degree video ads that users could explore by panning around with their mouse or moving a mobile device to look around a scene.

At the 2016 IVRPA (International VR Photography Association) conference, Gavin co-presented a session about "bridging the VR advertising gap," describing how Yahoo was creating 360-degree image and video ad experiences "at scale" and personalizing them using Yahoo's vast audience data. This was cutting-edge for the time, merging VR content with ad targeting in ways few competitors had attempted. The work placed Yahoo as an innovator in a space that was just beginning to capture industry imagination, and it laid groundwork for Yahoo's later forays into AR/VR content across its news and sports verticals.

Innovations in Ad Technology

Throughout the decade, Gavin was instrumental in pushing the boundaries of what digital advertising could achieve, pioneering numerous interactive formats that were new to Yahoo when introduced.

Rich Media Firsts: The work included Yahoo's first ads with embedded mini-games, first ads with 3D elements that viewers could spin around within the ad unit, and first ads with augmented-reality components such as webcam-based AR games for brands. These innovations often began as rapid prototypes for sales pitches. If Yahoo's sales team wanted to show a major client a never-before-seen ad concept, Gavin would create the demo. Some of these prototypes became actual ad products offered to all advertisers.

Tumblr Sponsored Content Integration: After Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr, there was a mandate to monetize the platform without alienating its passionate user base. Gavin played a key role in creating Tumblr's sponsored content formats, designing the first sponsored Tumblr post templates and custom Tumblr blog themes for advertisers. This was particularly challenging because Tumblr had a very specific visual style and user experience, meaning ads had to feel like part of the Tumblr ecosystem rather than foreign intrusions. The team devised ways to label and style sponsored posts so they would catch attention but not feel overly intrusive, and built advertiser Tumblr pages (tumblr.com/brandname) that were essentially microsites for campaigns. This cross-platform innovation, marrying a new acquisition's technology with Yahoo's advertising engine, was a significant part of Yahoo's strategy under CEO Marissa Mayer.

Advertorial and Native Content: As content marketing grew in importance, the team developed sponsored content experiences including advertorial microsites and sponsored Tumblr pages that allowed brands to tell stories in an editorial style. If a tech sponsor wanted a custom Yahoo Tech article series, the Creative Solutions team would produce branded page layouts, rich media inserts, and interactive infographics to bring it to life. These efforts required close collaboration with Yahoo's editorial and product teams to ensure sponsored content was engaging yet clearly branded.

Dynamic Creative and Data Integration: Yahoo's advertising platform incorporated increasingly data-driven creative optimization during this era. Working with engineers to integrate Yahoo's audience data with creative meant designing flexible asset templates that could accommodate variations, such as dynamic ads showing different content to different users based on location or interests. Collaboration with Yahoo's ad tech teams on internal platforms ensured these systems could swap out creative elements on the fly, allowing Yahoo to serve more relevant, personalized advertising.

Building the Infrastructure

Working at Yahoo's scale meant managing an enormous volume of creative assets and sophisticated delivery systems. The role required fluency in multiple platforms and systems.

Yahoo AdInterax: In the early years, AdInterax was the essential tool for building and deploying interactive ads. This digital asset management and ad authoring system for rich media allowed ingesting client assets (images, videos, Flash files) and assembling complex ad units with video players, expandable sections, and interactive elements. The platform handled trafficking these creatives across Yahoo's network, ensuring consistent behavior across different Yahoo sites. Proficiency with AdInterax allowed implementing last-minute changes or brand asset updates quickly, which was critical when overseeing millions of impressions worth of advertising.

Asset Libraries and Workflow: Within the Creative Solutions group, Gavin helped maintain an internal asset library for advertising materials, effectively managing a repository of countless images, animations, and code snippets that powered campaigns. A single campaign (like an automotive launch) might have dozens of variations: different sizes, languages, and interactive elements, all requiring storage, version control, and compliance with file size and animation length requirements. The role required organizing and handling massive creative datasets, building on asset management skills developed earlier in his career.

Celtra Integration: As mobile advertising rose in importance, integrating Celtra's cloud-based creative management platform into Yahoo's workflow became essential. The team served as the bridge between Celtra's technology and Yahoo's ad inventory, implementing Celtra's ad formats (like swipeable galleries or playful mobile interstitials) and sometimes customizing Celtra templates for Yahoo's specific needs. This collaboration ensured Yahoo could offer more engaging mobile-native ads, including branded "canvas" ads and in-feed native ads with interactive elements, keeping Yahoo competitive in the mobile era.

This infrastructure work rarely made headlines, but it was essential. At any given moment, thousands of ad creatives were live across Yahoo's network, requiring robust systems to manage the scale of an inventory reaching hundreds of millions of users.

Industry Recognition

The work at Yahoo earned recognition both within the company and across the industry.

Press Coverage: Beyond the New York Times and MediaPost coverage of the Diet Dr Pepper campaign, Yahoo's creative campaigns were regularly submitted for industry awards and featured in case studies. Yahoo's advertising blog and press releases touted new ad formats and major partnerships, and the Creative Solutions team's work on experiences like Yahoo's "full canvas" ads contributed to Yahoo's reputation for advertising innovation.

Flickr Blog Feature: In July 2015, the official Flickr Blog profiled Gavin as part of a photographer spotlight, noting his accomplishments in panoramic photography and his role on Yahoo's Ad Creative Tech team. The feature discussed his passion for 360-degree imagery and included his work shooting a 360-degree panorama from atop One World Trade Center. This internal spotlight showed the creative crossover between his personal artistic practice and his professional work on VR and 360-degree advertising. In the piece, Gavin advocated for Flickr to support interactive 360-degree content, hinting at future media integrations that aligned with his forward-thinking approach.

Conference Presentations: The 2016 IVRPA conference presentation on VR advertising positioned both Yahoo and Gavin as thought leaders in immersive advertising. Colleagues like Andrew Balfour, Yahoo's Global Creative Lead, often cited the work the team had accomplished, and these industry talks spread awareness of Yahoo's creative solutions capabilities among peers and potential clients.

The Bigger Picture

By August 2017, when the Yahoo chapter closed, the advertising industry had transformed dramatically from where it stood a decade earlier. Flash had given way to HTML5. Mobile had overtaken desktop. Native advertising and content marketing had emerged alongside traditional display. And the first experiments in VR and AR were hinting at what might come next.

Having navigated each of these transitions from inside one of the internet's largest media companies provided invaluable perspective. The campaigns earned press coverage and client satisfaction, but the deeper education came from understanding how creative innovation, technology platforms, and business strategy intersect at scale. The role had required functioning as both a creative producer (hands-on designing and animating ad content) and a manager (leading projects and mentoring a team), with a blend of design skill and technical understanding that would define the work to come.