You really have to wonder about Jerry Yang’s sense of timing.

Yahoo! has spent months talking up its forthcoming Amp online advertising platform (or, to give it its proper name, AMP!) This is the system that is meant to give advertisers a simpler, more effective way of placing ads around the Web, on Yahoo’s sites and beyond. Yahoo needs some quick results to prove that it can survive on its own: a lot is riding on Amp.

So it’s a fair bet that the new platform will feature prominently when Yang appears at New York’s Advertising Week on September 24th (in one of those classic, self-referential ad industry moments he will be joined on stage by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.)

But the advertising world will probably have something else on its mind, because guess what? The very next day, Yahoo’s controversial advertising partnership with Google is due to go live (that’s the one that an association of prominent advertisers just complained to the Department of Justice about.) The agreement that Google and Yahoo signed back in June requires their arrangement to be activated within 105 days (the relevant wording is in section 16 of this filing.)

Alas, the two internet companies have painted themselves into a corner with this one. They made a great show at the outset of delaying the implementation of the alliance to give anti-trust regulators time to review it. But there is no need for the DoJ to run to Yahoo’s timetable or (since it’s not a merger) give any assurance that the arrangement won’t come under regulatory attack at some point in the future. Also, having just hired a heavyweight lawyer to decide whether there’s a case to pursue, it’s unlikely the justice department will want to rush into a decision in less than two weeks.

That leaves Yahoo and Google between a rock and a hard place.

They can go ahead and implement the agreement on the 25th regardless. But, as Eric Schmidt already found when he suggested this to Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago, this can sound a lot like arrogance. Not the kind of message you want to send to Washington, which is no doubt why Google later felt the need to “clarify” it’s bosses words.

The alternative is to delay the search partnership, but that would look like weakness. It would also send an ominous signal that the alliance was unravelling: after October 10th, either side can walk away from the deal if it looks like regulators will oppose it.

For Jerry Yang, life certainly doesn’t get any easier.

September 12, 2008 7:11pm in Internet | Comment