I get one response, and one response only, when I tell people I help manage advertising at Yahoo! — "Ya-hooooo!". We've been lucky enough to create some pretty funny, memorable ads over the years, and even luckier to create the oft-repeated and oft-imitated Yahoo! yodel. We get requests all the time for the audio file as well as our logo and even copies of our ads. Talent rights and licensing issues make it difficult (OK, expensive!) to share many of our really old ads, but the good news is that we're opening up the door for you to create your own Yahoo! ads using our logos and even our yodel.

The theme of this new marketing program is "Your Yahoo! is changing." It's an admittedly irreverent celebration of our new Yahoo.com home page. And rather than hiring a production company, our ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, worked with film schools around the world (including the London Film Academy, Yale, Parsons The New School in New York, and the Art Institute of California — San Francisco) to produce 11 new commercials, each with a unique take on the theme. You can check them all out here.

The film students were amazing to work with — they submitted over 100 treatments to our agency, met with our creative directors, argued with our creative directors, and ultimately proposed such amazingly creative and imaginative work that we're using it in an ad campaign running all over the Internet right now. Here’s a fun little behind-the-scenes video on how the students used talking fruit, pirates, robots, line drawings, and longshoremen to get the point across.

Now, we're inviting you to create your very own commercial. Click the "Make Your Own Video" link on the campaign site to download scripts, Yahoo! logos, and even our yodel. So all you budding filmmakers, ad critics, marketing skeptics, and honorary Yahoos, go ahead — give it a shot. We hope you enjoy the program and find the spots as funny, charming, and, well, odd as we do.

Cheers,

Nick Chavez
Marketing Director, Advertising & Media

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UPDATE: As part of this campaign, we decided to roam our campus to find out how just how Yahoo! is changing. We discovered our fellow employees play with their Yahoo! quite often. Have a look.