Yahoo have found a way to take more cash off their advertisers hands whilst destroying consumer confidence and making it sound like a win-win for everyone.  Boy are their clients going to be disappointed.  What they’ve done is automatically started showing advertisers’ full web ads on iPhones and Androids.  According to the recent Yahoo blog entry:

The coolest part is you don’t have to do anything to expand the reach of your ads. We’ve done it for you. As of today, your ads should begin appearing immediately on these devices for relevant searches, if they have not already.

With this tweak, standard Sponsored Search ads (40-character header, 70-character description, the host URL—you know the drill) will appear on these mobile devices, giving your ads wider appeal and more relevancy to people on the go.

Will it expand the reach of their ads?  Yes.  Will it give them wider appeal?  Probably.  Will they be more relevant?  Of course not.  Because the landing pages for these ads were built for the full web.  Some will use flash.  Some will have video or sound streaming.  Some may offer PC/mac downloads.  And all will be fullscreen sized and force the user to scroll around the page on their mobile screen to see what the offer or content is.  Even on an iPhone, the impact of a full web landing page will be greatly reduced compared to the full web experience.

This means advertisers will be throwing away money as smartphone users click on promising ads only to be disappointed by an incomplete or unreadable landing page (if they can wait long enough … only a small proportion of smartphone users around the world have 3G data speeds).  And Yahoo will massively increase ad exposures and click throughs thus generating lots of yummy extra revenue for nothing.

Advertisers need information and control.  If they want to bring iPhone and Android users to a full web landing page, fine.  But if they know what they’re doing they ought to create specific landing pages for these devices so their message can really be made relevant and impactful for their audience.  Yahoo should give them the choice.

My advice to advertisers: Tell Yahoo to take your full web ads off smartphones and let you use their Yahoo Mobile Sponsored Search product for that instead like you always have.

Update: Google got it right by giving their advertisers the option – see their blog post New Adwords options for iPhone and G1 .