Just a month after Google closed its $3.4BN acquisition of ad sales management firm DoubleClick, Yahoo! has taken the wraps off its "Apex" project and said that it will be called AMP! - and ad publishing platform to rival those already being used by Google, Microsoft, and AOL to sell ads Web-wide.

"We believe AMP! will deliver a faster, easier, and more automated and integrated way to create, buy, and sell advertising and do so across a transparent global marketplace," said Hilary Schneider, Yahoo! EVP of Global Partner Solutions today in a statement. "While online advertising grows more sophisticated, the process of doing business today is surprisingly cumbersome and manual," Schneider continued.

With the time saved by using AMP!, Schneider contends, the advertising industry can better focus on developing great creative.

The AMP! platform, says Yahoo!, will help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory - all from a single, integrated interface. The company describes it as follows:

"[AMP!] will have the ability to deliver highly relevant advertising to consumers across the entire Web, driving better results for marketers. It will provide a suite of tools that easily allows precise geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting across a vast network that includes Yahoo! owned-and-operated inventory and more than 600 U.S. newspapers in the Newspaper Consortium. An open platform available to any participant, AMP! will ultimately include Yahoo!'s network of premium publishing partners, agencies, ad networks, and thousands of other smaller publishers from across the web."

Yahoo! has invested significantly in the AMP! technology platform, the company says.  Designed based on extensive analysis of the inefficiencies that currently constrain the industry, it is being built by an extensive team of engineers, product managers and strategists, and user-interface design experts deeply familiar with the online advertising industry.

A video demonstration of AMP! can be viewed at http://advertising.yahoo.com/amp.

Formerly referred to as Project Apex, AMP! from Yahoo!, will roll out in phases beginning with members of the Newspaper Consortium in Q3 2008. Yahoo! plans to extend the functionality of the platform as well as particpation to additional publishers, advertisers, agencies, and ad networks through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.