Millard (pictured here) went to MSLO after many years of building and running Yahoo’s (YHOO) ad business (previous to that stint, she worked at DoubleClick in its earliest days).

She was also recently made chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the prominent interactive ad trade group.

Nonetheless, Millard left Yahoo under a cloud, as she and the company parted on the way online ads should be sold going forward and then got into a bit of a tussle of just who left whom, especially with Yahoo President Sue Decker.

Without going into the complicated and conflicting details, some of which became personal and became very public, it was definitely not the way Yahoo should have rewarded Millard–who is well-liked and well-known in the ad industry–after years of loyal service.

As I wrote in a post on her Yahoo departure a year ago:

But I did have an idea about how cloddishly that Yahoo could handle Millard’s departure, in a vain attempt to make it look like they are on the ball in a time of management turmoil that seems only to roil and boil more as time goes on. The decimation of executive ranks there is like watching an online version of “Ten Little Indians,” or for you kids, “Hostel.”

And when you badly treat an employee who has worked pretty hard over the years for you as Yahoo did Millard, you have to wonder how in the world the company is going to attract top talent from the outside–let alone keep those valuable employees on the inside from bolting.

But Millard’s departure–which seems to be a case of her looking for and getting another job, all while Yahoo was also rejiggering its approach to ad sales–was handled with no grace and much confusion.”

Sounds like a bit of a broken record for Yahoo by now; as it turned out, Millard became one of the first in a long line of Yahoo execs to head for the exits.

Millard first went to MSLO as its president of media and got the top job (jointly with Merchandising President Robin Marino) after former President and CEO Susan Lyne stepped down.

There she will have to focus a lot on MSLO’s online business, which is probably its best bet for future growth.

The company needs it, as it has been clawing its way back to better results of late. MSLO stock has been dropping since 2007, all the way to close to $5 a share, although it seems to have stabliized more recently in the mid-$7 range.

It is a good thing–oh, I had to–that online advertising is a topic Millard knows well.

In fact, she actually likes talking about the block and tackle of figuring out how to properly use commercial messages within the online space.

At Yahoo and today, she was well known as a backer of brands over the holy algorithm and has often railed against treating online ads as if they were pork bellies–that is, commoditizing the business.

Here’s the video of her talking about it and more:

And we like her 25% more now, after seeing the new pictures she took for Wired’s latest issue, as well as a particularly sassy interview she did with the magazine.

The homemaking empress is on the cover of Wired, pictured here making a Wii-shaped cake. It looks delicious, but apparently is not from these recipe instructions that leave out the baking soda for architectural reasons.

And another picture here by Jill Greenberg has her pruning a robot hedge, along with this interview with Mark Frauenfelder on her gadget-freak status.

That’s been easy to see for many years. I ran into her first more than a decade ago at a Microsoft party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and she has shown up at a variety of Silicon Valley events from time to time.

In addition, Stewart has attended the D conference for the past two years, first accompanying Martha Stewart Omnimedia CEO Susan Lyne, who appeared onstage at D4. But I was surprised to observe that she has actually been one of the few attendees who has sat through all of the sessions from start to finish.

She even managed to fire off a very funny but pointed series of questions at D4 to Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer about the nest of wires current gadgets require to operate. Here she is pictured grilling Stringer and also showing one of D’s teen panelists how to properly fold a T-shirt.

In the current interview with Wired, Stewart makes some other salient points, especially about quality. “Whether you’re a programmer or a seamstress, it’s all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques and consolidating steps,” she said. “Making things go faster–but not worse. Better.”

She also jokingly blames the end of her marriage on the Walkman, which she calls the “Rudeman,” and decries using email over talking, although she seems pretty addicted to her BlackBerry from what I have seen (to be fair, so am I).

And Stewart is also apparently working on “Marthapedia,” which is her take on the user-contributed Wikipedia project. Of course, it being Martha, she will be editing user content.

“It won’t be as freewheeling as Wikipedia,” she said. “Because a lot of this–you have to really monitor it.”

And that is a good thing.

That included Millard herself, who called me back this morning from New York to talk about her leaving the company for another high-profile job as president of media at Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Her quick exit last weekend caused Yahoo to lash back at her in a press release, essentially suggesting she was not qualified for her Yahoo duties anymore.

It’s one thing to think Millard was not quite right for the new challenges Yahoo faces in the ad business and a need to focus more on technical solutions, which she even seems to agree with, but it’s another thing to publicly give her a hard time for it.

In any case, the encounter ripped back the curtains on executive infighting at Yahoo, which is in the midst of some wrenching changes.

“I am very disturbed that Yahoo chose to turn my resignation into something that it was not,” said Millard. “I feel very sorry for Yahoo these days.”

Well, who doesn’t, given all the focus on its management turmoil and wobbly vision of late at the Web giant, capped last week by the news that CEO Terry Semel was giving up his job to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang?

Millard attributed the behavior toward her to the intense pressure top executives are feeling because of relentlessly bad headlines, and especially because of the even worse news about the business.

The company has been buffeted by competition from Google in the search ad arena and more recently has seen a hit in its graphical display ad business.

Even Yahoo sources hostile to Millard, an experienced online ad exec, said she deserves credit for revitalizing its ability to sell to major-brand advertisers when she came on in 2001.

But they also said she was probably about to get the lion’s share of the blame for an expected falloff in graphical ad sales at Yahoo in its upcoming quarterly report.

That’s an area Millard was in charge of, and she acknowledged that the company needed to overhaul the way it sold advertising.

She said she was, in fact, part of the integration that has been going on for over a year about how to bring all ad sales together to sell in a more efficient manner.

As part of those changes, she said she was, in fact, open to the idea that she would take over international ad sales. “I had done the U.S. for six years and I thought it might be interesting,” she said.

Yahoo sources tell a different version, of course, claiming that Millard had become uncooperative over the last year and resistant to the changes being made, especially the new focus on “performance” advertising rather than brand ads that she preferred.

“Wenda really excelled in the branded ad business, where it is all about the emotional links people have to products,” said one exec at Yahoo. “But this was an environment where now it was all about measurement of ad results, and she resisted.”

Noting that executives at Yahoo always debate alternatives and that she did not always agree with every direction chosen, Millard scoffed at the characterization that she had become obstructive.

And she denied especially one particular story Yahoo sources related to me as an example of her difficulty: That she got into an ugly public fight at a recent ad confab in Cannes with the man who took over for her.

That would be David Karnstedt, pictured here, who is now the head of Yahoo’s now-coordinated North American advertising sales and who used to be in charge of just the U.S. search ad sales.

“Don’t you think that would be in the papers given all the focus on Yahoo?” said Millard. “It’s just silly.”

Millard said that she was simply approached by MSLO CEO Susan Lyne about coming to the media company many months ago. More recently, she thought it was a better move than the international job at Yahoo.

Lyne backed Millard on this timeline and said in an email that she tried to work with Yahoo to coordinate the announcement, to no avail.

Both she and Millard were then stunned to read a remarkably sour-grapes quote in a press release attributed to Gregory Coleman, the executive vice president of global sales.

“While Wenda was a big contributor to our success in the past, the industry has shifted and requires a different set of skills to take the business forward,” he said.

That seems to translate into: She can’t get on board with this newfangled ad business.

That contention seems patently questionable and makes an old pro like Millard seem bizarrely stubborn.

While intense data focus in the ad business is clearly not Millard’s forte (but it is Karnstedt’s), to contend that all her skills were now obsolete seemed odd, too.

In any case, MSLO thinks she has what it takes, putting her in charge of a number of businesses, including online, publishing, TV and radio.

And so did many ad players who contacted me yesterday. “She is a star,” said one person, who was a longtime rival of Millard’s at another big online company. “And worse for Yahoo is that advertisers love her, so this makes them look really petty.”

Millard said she feels blindsided, noting that she did not think her relationships at Yahoo had become that frayed.

“I always had great relationships there and had six great years there,” she said. “So I am stunned.”

I am hoping to talk to both Coleman and Karnstedt today about all this–they are at another Yahoo ad confab in Long Island, where they are trying to figure out ways to get the company’s ad business back on track.

And that’s a big enough issue to deal with without all this self-inflicted noise.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. ]]> http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070626/wenda-speaks/feed/ 0