Yahoo Search Monetization System. Yes that’s right. Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel has the nerve or ‘nads to call his three-years-too-late replacement of the Overture code base the "Yahoo Search Monetization System". Subtle huh? At least it sounds better than the “Yahoo-Will-Get-More-Money-Out-Of-You System.”

Mr. Semel must really be concerned about getting the YHOO stock price up AND be very comfortable in the fact that most of his advertisers really don’t have a whole lot of choice about doing business with him.

Of course, the real name isn’t very good either. It’s apparently supposed to be called ‘Yahoo Search Marketing’ a descriptive name that in no way makes it easy to distinguish between the software and the broader Yahoo search engine or organic search marketing on Yahoo.

Inside the application itself all the logos say Yahoo Marketing Solutions – so much from brand consistency. Of course everybody refers to it as Panama (including Semel). Just for a laughs someone left the name 'Overture US' in the pull-down menus in the internal reporting system for use when you want to see Yahoo-only reports. And they’ve hidden it at the easy to remember and type URL of marketingsolutions.yahoo.com.

Our experience thus far has been that the Panama interface is quite nice and a massive improvement over the old Overture offering. The internal reporting is good, there are some nice things like the chart of high and low bid prices for a keyword, and the system is snappy in terms of performance.

The transition has been another matter, with poor notification, an insane ‘auto-reorganization’ which is applied to campaigns, and broken/backlogged import methods as the only choice with which to fix the unrequested ‘upgrade’ campaign changes. The whole thing has had all the comfort and class of a shotgun wedding.

You’d think that if someone built a system just to take our money they’d at least try to make it a pleasant experience. And give it a friendly name.

Update: A good list of issues with Panama.