From talking fruit to pirates: Yahoo!’s newest ads

Posted August 7th, 2006 at 4:09 pm by Nick Chavez, Vice President, Integrated Marketing

 8 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Our Users

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.

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8 Comments Add your own

Guillaumeb | August 7th, 2006 at 5:26 pm

Some of the videos are hilarious. It makes me wanna make my own! Got few ideas already :)

Balakumar Muthu | August 8th, 2006 at 3:01 am

Very Interesting and Funny !! :) , thanks for pointing us … I am going to try out my own !!

yeehaw | August 8th, 2006 at 4:50 pm

Why didn’t you let the film students create their own scripts around the idea of “Your Yahoo! is changing”. Seems like you would have had more variety.

Nate | August 8th, 2006 at 8:10 pm

The marketing program reminds me much of the “Your Altoids are changing” Internet campaign one or two of years ago. Very similar, even down to the washed-out geeky 80s high school photos. Still funny though.

Kyle Korleski | August 9th, 2006 at 5:57 pm

I am going to place my Yahoo! Ad on Google Video ^_^

Nick's Sister | August 9th, 2006 at 8:11 pm

One Word: Hilarious…Hi-larious ;)
p.s. I look forward to future posts!

Nick Chavez | August 10th, 2006 at 12:02 am

Yeehaw: Thanks for the question. We did in fact both offer up our scripts AND invite the students to create their own. One of the eleven – “Pirates” – is actually an original script. And I think it’s great that many of the user submissions thus far haven’t used the available scripts either. My favorite is the brand new one with the guy who plays the yodel on his guitar.

Alice | August 22nd, 2006 at 3:56 pm

The “new” page is horrendous! Not only does it rot, but the option they finally put on the bottom of the page to switch to the old page doesn’t work!!!!!

Whoever the fools are who keep dreaming up the “new” page should all be fired because it’s completely unappealing to look at and it takes longer than the old page to load!