As Yahoo tries to catch up to Google in automated advertising, it continues to lose the human capital now-departed managers like Wenda Harris Millard so carefully built. The latest defection: Valeh Vakili, an eight-year veteran of the portal's salesforce, who has joined MySpace as a senior vice president in charge of sales strategy, based in New York, the heart of the ad business. The Valley's algorithmists scoff at MySpace's naive "hypertargeting" ad strategy, which lumps users into broad groups (sports fans, for example). And yet those very simple labels are very easy to explain to the very simple people who buy large amounts of advertising. True, MySpace has struggled to meet its revenue targets. But for anyone who believes that people still have a role in the buying and selling of ads, it's a better place to be than Yahoo.

Contact information for this author is not available.