Yahoos in the rain

Posted April 2nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 5 Comments / Filed in: Working at Yahoo!

How do you “spread the yodel” and delight your audience without spending a million bucks? Get creative!

That’s the M.O. behind our Buzz Marketing department, a team of creative types that regularly dream up never-been-done-before gigs to get Yahoo! a bit of attention. Over the years, their more grassroots campaigns have included a Yahoo!-branded Zamboni, the first Internet-connected taxi and Amtrak train, an impromptu Shakira concert in Times Square, a search for the greenest city in America, a bachelorette living on a Los Angeles billboard in search of the perfect man, pedicabs and hot cocoa at the Olympics, and the world’s largest brain, flea market, snow globe, haystack (wherein visitors sought needles), parade of Santas, etc.

We recently empowered Yahoos to come up with Buzz campaign ideas of their own (on a shoestring, of course) to share some purple love. And two guys from our headquarters and Portland, Oregon, offices had a mind meld: surprise rainy-day train commuters with 150 Yahoo!-branded umbrellas. (What’s effective marketing without a little useful schwag?)

Alex Huang and some colleagues set up camp at dawn at a Starbucks near a Portland MAX train (the local commuter rail). Portlanders accepted their purple and white umbrellas with glee — including a transit cop, who rolled up on his Segway, not to cite them but to snag one for himself. The bumbershoots were gone within 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, down in San Francisco, Sreevatsan Rama assembled a street team outside the Caltrain station. In spite of inaccurate shower predictions by our perennially weather-befuddled meteorologists, the umbrellas went like hotcakes. When asked “Do you Yahoo?,” recipients responded with “Of course, it’s my homepage!” and oft-used product names like Mail, Maps, Search, Autos, Finance, etc. were called out into the air.

Except, of course, the guy who just smiled and pointed to the Google logo on his backpack. Oddly, he didn’t accept an umbrella.

There are plenty more ideas in the hopper. So don’t be surprised to see eager, tchotchke-laden Yahoos in a city near you. They might even make you yodel.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Tagged: buzz marketing, Working at Yahoo!

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5 Comments Add your own

Mariano Rentería | April 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 pm

I hope I can see something like that here at Mexico city, if you need a volunteer I’m on!!

Henry | April 3rd, 2008 at 1:36 am

What happened to the yellow? I thought Yahoo’s colors were purple and yellow.

Justin Thorp | April 3rd, 2008 at 6:32 am

I still think the best way to “spread the yodel” is to make a good product. If you make something that helps people, it will bubble up. People will talk about it and get their friends to try it. The friends will get their friends to try it.

Jonathan Magnus | April 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm

I really like what you did with the Pedicab’s at the Olympics. I believe this would be well received in Portland.

Jonathan
Pdx Pedicab
503-Pedicab

Nicki Dugan | April 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

@Henry: Yellow’s not gone… it’s just been put in the back seat. A few years ago, we decided to make purple our “primary” color and moved yellow to “secondary” or complementary brand color. We wanted to associate a single color with the brand that fit our brand personality. Like Coke had red and John Deere owns green, we wanted to own purple. But we have a whole palette of secondary colors, yellow among them, that show up as well. Make sense?

Nicki Dugan
Yodel Editor