Yahoo!’s EVP of the Americas named one of world’s leading media strategists 

Just twelve months after joining Yahoo! as the Executive Vice President of the Americas region, Ross Levinsohn has been recognized by Ad Age as a 2011 Media Maven. The annual Media Mavens awards fete the world's leading media strategists for their creative thinking, leadership and innovation. At an event in New York today honoring the award winners, Levinsohn was in very good company with honorees from brands like Apple, P&G and Warner Bros.

During his year-long tenure, Levinsohn has created a strong track record for championing unique content experiences and new partnerships that benefit Yahoo!’s consumers and advertisers. He’s committed to pushing the boundaries and ensuring Yahoo!’s continued leadership position as the premiere digital media company. Here’s a look back at some of the company’s key accomplishments under Levinsohn: 

• Yahoo! remains the top-ranked site in an amazing 13 U.S. categories, including sports, mail, news, finance, entertainment-news, shopping, TV, real estate, autos, instant messaging, and photos. 

• The Royal Wedding was the largest video event in Yahoo!’s history, surpassing the funeral of pop star Michael Jackson by 21 percent, and totaling 27 million video streams and 2.6 million live video streams over the 24-hour period from Friday to Saturday. 

• The death of Osama bin Laden marked new traffic records on Yahoo! News, surpassed only by March’s earthquake in Japan. More than 45 million pages on Yahoo! were viewed about bin Laden’s death those two days—more page views than these Websites got for the entire month: NPR, Salon, TechCrunch, The Atlantic, or Google Reader. 

• Yahoo! had all the top 10 original shows on the Web in August. Calling Yahoo! "the broadcast network of the digital age," Yahoo! Media Network senior VP Mickie Rosen announced a slate of eight new video series aimed at the 13 million women who watch Yahoo! video.

• To commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Yahoo! partnered with National September 11 Memorial & Museum (9/11 Memorial) and co-produced a memorial microsite which included tools for users to tell their own stories.

• Yahoo! and ABC announce a new partnership that will bring both consumers and advertisers a treasure trove of premium video content.
• Yahoo! is named the official, and only broadcast destination for “A Decade of Difference” –a concert celebrating the philanthropic work of President Clinton and The William J. Clinton Foundation, featuring an all-star group of the most influential and socially responsible artists, including Bono and Lady Gaga. Yahoo!’s Decade of Difference microsite received more than 200 million page views. 
•Yahoo! announced a partnership with Microsoft and AOL to offer each other’s premium non-reserved online display inventory to their respective advertising customers. 
• Yahoo! was the official live-streaming partner of the premier of “Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1”, churning out wall-to-wall coverage of the scene at L.A. Live’s Nokia Theater, including star arrivals and fan reaction. The live stream was syndicated internationally, ensuring that fans all over the world could get a glimpse of the event. An exclusive “Breaking Dawn” trailer on Yahoo! shattered records with 2.9 million streams in a single day.

In an interview earlier this fall, Levinsohn told Ad Age, "I don't want to look back and say, 'Gosh, we had a chance to be innovative and bold, but we just felt comfortable and scared to do something different.'"Today’s award and the list of accomplishments above indicate he doesn’t need to worry about that. 

Victor Tsaran is one of those people who leaves people with a long lasting impression. He grew up in a Ukrainian orphanage and is now a talented computer engineer in the U.S. He’s an accomplished musician and songwriter. And he also happens to be blind.

Victor runs Yahoo!’s accessibility program. He helps make it easy for people with all kinds of disabilities to use our sites. When I first met Victor, I had the same naïve reaction most people have – dumbfounded by how he could crank open his laptop and be fully self-sufficient reading email and surfing the web. That’s because I was clueless about all the remarkable ways that people with disabilities use technology.

Victor’s made it his mission to educate our designers and engineers, helping change their assumptions that accessibility somehow requires sacrifice or compromise. On the contrary, Victor argues that accessible design is better for everyone. Just as curb-cuts were designed for wheelchairs, they’re also a great convenience for strollers, luggage and shopping carts, right?

But driving the point home sometimes means making someone walk a mile in his moccasins. Enter the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, which has been toured by more than 75 product teams to date. It’s filled with a wide array of assistive technologies – screen readers, onscreen keyboards, interactive Braille displays, etc. When Yahoos arrive, they’re told they’ve just had a stroke and can’t type with their fingers. They’re given a rubber ball and asked to type their name. Um… Next, they’re fully paralyzed. “OK, try to send an email.” Uh… After they’re introduced to the technology solutions, they watch videos of disabled people in action.

All this leaves developers making accessibility a goal before they write their first line of code. It’s why anybody can access rich features and tools on products like Yahoo! Sports, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone. It’s why third-party websites that are inaccessible in their own right are now entirely accessible via the new “favorites” area on the Yahoo! Homepage. Victor has helped Yahoo! make enormous strides since joining us four years ago, but there’s still more to come.

We spent some time following Victor with a video camera to not only understand his work, but to appreciate his daily experience. Commuting by train. Playing guitar. Making lunch with his wife Karo Caran, a fellow student from the Overbrook School for the Blind. We watched as sighted people had their first awkward interactions with him. He laughs when he describes how often people raise their hands when he asks questions during his new hire orientation briefings. Well-meaning commuters sometimes escort him to the wheelchair zone on the train platform. It took me a while to realize he’s not offended by questions like “Did you see my email?”

Spend any amount of time with Victor and you realize that his blindness doesn’t really make him all that different from anyone else – except that his computer talks to him. Really, really fast.

There are 60 million people with disabilities in the U.S. There are more than 10 times that number around the globe. Yahoo!’s Accessibility team wants to make sure that every one of these individuals is able to use Yahoo! as their web site of choice. That will only be possible, of course, if every corner of our network is fully accessible.

While we still have work to do toward that end, we did reach a significant milestone when Yahoo! India launched an Accessibility Lab in Bangalore. It is modeled after our Sunnyvale lab, which has demonstrated a variety of assistive technologies to hundreds of Yahoos since it launched in 2008.

Our Accessibility Labs are important tools for engineers who can’t imagine life with a disability. The reality is that not everyone can use a mouse, type on a keyboard, or see the computer screen. We simulate that experience so our developers can learn how to think about users with disabilities during their product development process. We have screen readers to help them understand the experience of a blind user, single switches and onscreen keyboards for physically disabled users, communication devices for kids with speech impairments, etc. More and more Yahoo! products are being designed and developed in our Bangalore office, so it became clear that we needed to enhance our ability to train engineers and designers there.

Also, as a global company, we are keenly aware that commercial screen readers are generally out of reach for most blind people living in developing countries. So we’ve sponsored the non-profit NV Access Foundation, which is working on a free, open-source screen reader. Our support will help them improve web features for NVDA for Windows, making it easier for visually-impaired users around the world to browse the Web – especially when they encounter Web 2.0 technologies. And by making NVDA’s screen reader a better product, we’re also helping all the web developers who use it as their testing tool.

Everybody wins.

Victor Tsaran
Sr. Accessibility Program Manager