Yahoo Inc said its chief domestic sales officer resigned and the company will merge its search and display advertising departments in the US as the Internet powerhouse fights to catch up with online search leader Google Inc.
Yahoo said on Sunday it hoped the latest shake-up would streamline the way it sells advertising to customers who increasingly want to buy ads across a variety of formats -- from being linked to search terms to popping up as a graphical display to being shown as video.
The reshuffling follows a major executive overhaul announced last week, with co-founder Jerry Yang (楊致遠) replacing Terry Semel as chief executive.
In the latest organizational change, Yahoo said that Wenda Millard, chief sales officer in the US, was leaving the company effective immediately.
While praising Millard's contributions over her past six years with the company, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said the industry had changed and the company needed a manager with different skills to push the company forward.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Millard, who immediately announced that she has taken the newly created position of president of media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc in New York, said she bore no ill will toward Yahoo.
"It was a great six years, I had a wonderful time, but I wanted to do something a little bit broader," she said.
"It's not really a comment on Yahoo. It's really a comment on where I wanted to go next, and this was just a great fit," she said.
David Karnstedt, who previously served as senior vice president of Yahoo's search sales business, was tapped to lead the newly combined sales teams as head of North American sales.
Yahoo has been looking for ways to gain ground on Google in the lucrative online advertising market, where Yahoo ranks a distant second despite once being the larger of the two companies.
One major hope for Yahoo is the upgraded advertising system it introduced in February. However, the payoff from that system isn't expected to start materializing until later this year.
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