An anthem is a song of praise or loyalty.  Our anthem is dedicated to you, to the 500 million other “you’s” who frequent Yahoo! every month, and to the billions of new “you’s” who will visit in the years to come. Yahoo! has a simple promise: We will strive to be the center of your online lives by connecting you with the people and things that matter most.

To bring this promise to life, we shot a series of videos, lush vignettes set in multiple countries around the world, intended to represent the beauty, vitality, and diversity of you.  We used the best of that video library to create the 60-second anthem you see below:

There were some great creative minds and stories behind the video footage.  Our advertising agency Ogilvy assembled a star-studded production team that designed, shot and edited the videos in about a month.  The team included director Samuel Bayer, who directed Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around Comes Around”; costume designer Colleen Atwood, who won Academy Awards for her work in “Chicago” and “Memoirs of a Geisha”; Longinus Fernandes, the choreographer from “Slumdog Millionaire;” and Patrick Lumb, production designer for “Valkyrie.”  The result of their work is a tapestry of scenes that reflect the core brand attributes of Yahoo! — human, fun and inventive — expressed by people like you.  Every shot, every expression has a story to tell.

We shot in five cities around the world– Los Angeles, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, London and Hong Kong.   We braved the summer heat in the Mojave desert.  We got caught in a monsoon in Mumbai with only Pokemon (!!) slickers to keep us dry.  We fished for a soccer ball in the Arabian Sea using a bucket.  There was plenty of action behind the scenes.  Here are some fun tidbits about a few of the key shots:

• Dancers in feathers: The dancers’ feathered skirts and headdresses were all hand-made by Colleen Atwood and her team. In the last scene, the lead dancer floating to the camera is suspended by cables.  And guess how many total dancers there are… only four.
• Rose petals in the desert: We’re an environmentally conscious company. We actually swept up every rose petal during our time in the Mojave and brought them back to our studios in LA (okay, permits required us to do so as well).
• Man jumping across frame: This scene is meant to evoke how using Yahoo! propels people to go further and to achieve more. We got the effect by having a gymnast jump from a trampoline across a picture frame suspended 25 feet. He nailed it on the first take.
• Ice cream cone kid: Spencer is our star 4-year old who you’ll see not only in this commercial, but also in various ads on the Web and in print. If you’re an Oprah viewer, look for Spencer at the end of her show.
• Soccer players: Soccer is the best way to illustrate the global nature of sports and to show Yahoo! as the place where sports fans share their passions. We shot these scenes in Los Angeles, Mumbai, London and Rio de Janeiro. The take in Mumbai was an ordeal. Besides the torrential downpour, our only soccer ball ended up in the Arabian Sea after the first take.
• Celebrity paparazzi: Millions of people visit Yahoo! for entertainment, celebrity gossip, and news.  A small crowd of people showed up in Los Angeles the day we were shooting to try to catch a glimpse of our “stars.”
• Video game character: This scene represents the online games available on Yahoo! Games. The “purple gobbler” character was created for us from scratch.
• Keystone cops: This is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Yahoo! Finance, one of our most popular sites. We shot this in the studio and employed techniques used during the days of silent pictures (the guy with the money bags is running on a treadmill).  Take a close look at the tires on the police car.
• Club scene: Shot in Filmistan Studios in Mumbai, the dance sequence was arranged by Longinus Fernandes, who also choreographed the final dance sequence in “Slumdog Millionaire.”  The “club smoke” you see is actually dust and dirt from the floor of the sound stage.
• Walking exclamation point: We climbed up to a rooftop in lower Mumbai to get this shot.
• Light artist: This scene features an LA artist “painting” the air with an LED flashlight. In post production, the effects company, Method, tracked the point of light he emitted and mapped lighting effects to the path. It emphasizes Yahoo! as a source of creativity. This effect harkens back to a similar photo taken of Pablo Picasso in his studio (link).
• The yodel: One of the highlights of our brand campaign is the re-launch of our signature yodel. Listen carefully at the end of the commercial. You’ll notice there isn’t one voice yodeling, but many. We recorded literally hundreds of different people yodeling and then blended them together to create a chorus. We wanted the new yodel to sound full and global, and to evoke a cheer from all the people around the world who visit Yahoo!.

There are many, many other amazing scenes that you will see in the weeks and months ahead.  Our plan is to leverage this library of video footage in online formats, in additional television commercials, on mobile phones, and even in digital billboards.  It began airing yesterday in the US, and you’ll see it in the UK and India starting October 5, and in other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

We hope you enjoy Anthem, and, more importantly, we hope you see YOU in it.

Nick Chavez
Vice President, Integrated Marketing

As Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele promised after giving a sneak preview last week, today we unveil our new global marketing campaign. It consists of online, television, radio, print, and outdoor creative that emphasizes how Yahoo! is focused on YOU like never before. Our new video ad, known as “Anthem,” was shot in five countries and features vignettes that illustrate the many ways in which Yahoo! helps you make the Internet your own.

Have a look:

The spot debuted online on Yahoo! (you.yahoo.com) as well as on sites like Yahoo! Video, YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu.com. It will also begin airing on all the major U.S. TV networks and top cable channels, including AMC, ESPN, USA, Comedy Central and Bravo. You’ll see it in the UK and India starting October 5, and in other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

Whaddaya think?

Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes insights into Anthem’s production…

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

In a couple weeks, we’re heading to the Big Apple for the third U.S. Open Hack Day, our first ever on the East Coast. On October 9-10, we will welcome developers from around the world to the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square for Yahoo! Open Hack NYC for two days of learning, networking, coding, and fun. It’s all free and you’re invited!

What is Open Hack Day? It’s what happens when clever web developers, a wireless connection, a host of web services, and massive quantities of caffeine, pizza and donuts come together for an all-night code-a-thon. After 24 hours, creative coders show off their mashup wares and clever apps, American Idol-style, before a panel of distinguished judges, who bestow awards, praise, and lots of geek cred.

Ever since the first Open Hack Day back in 2006, we’ve made it a priority to be as open and accessible to developers as possible. Yahoo!’s audience is global – and so is the base of developers who value our open tools,technologies and vast user base. We’ve hosted Open Hack Days in the U.K., India, Brazil, and Taiwan; next month, we’ll meet with developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from New York’s vibrant Web technology and digital media scene.

We’ll kick off the weekend with a Friday morning keynote from Internet guru and NYU professor Clay Shirky. That’s followed by a full day of tech talks, panel conversations, and hands-on workshops that cover the latest Yahoo! developer tools and services. Yahoo!’s open platforms let developers build things that anyone can use on and off Yahoo!: Flickr toys, Connected TV Widgets, and open apps that you can install for Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, and more. On Friday evening, we’ll kick off the hack contest and hold our breath to see what’s built by Saturday afternoon. And in-between, we’ll host a special Open Hack edition of Ignite NYC — a geek’s open mic.

What will take this year’s prize? A moblogging purse, a phenomenal way to share and organize your photos in Yahoo! Mail, an iPhone orchestra, or something we haven’t even thought of yet?

To get a better sense of the Open Hack Day showdown, check out Ricky Montalvo’s “Hackumentary,” a short film documentary shot during last year’s event in Sunnyvale. Here’s the trailer:

Hack Day – a hackumentary short film from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

Head over to http://www.icanhaz.com/yahoohacknyc to register, check out the wiki, or follow us (@ydn) on Twitter for updates. Let the countdown to Open Hack Day 2009 begin!

Chris Yeh
Head of the Yahoo! Developer Network

As Elisa Steele, our chief marketing officer, noted in her post about the launch of our new brand campaign, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months getting to know what we mean to people. To bring that to life, we set out with a camera and a microphone and caught up with a wide variety of users to ask them what difference we make in their lives.

Here’s a video that captures just some of their stories:

Some notes on these great characters, by order of appearance:

• Sonia uses the homepage to manage her life… and admits to listening to Launchcast radio on Yahoo! Music when she’s in the shower.
• Dennis first used Yahoo! Search in grade school to look up the pink Power Ranger (he had a big crush).
• Bob lives on Yahoo! Finance and swears it helped him save his retirement funds.
• Evelyn relied on Yahoo! to stay connected to the world when she was in the Air Force, stationed in the desolate Australian outback.
• Bodhi is a California grad student from India who uses Yahoo! Messenger video chat to connect with her parents in India every night.
• Ted and Vicky used Yahoo! Messenger to court each other – much of it long distance. They also ditched their cable when discovering they could meet all their entertainment needs on Yahoo!.
• Erin is a fine art photographer who’s created a huge following on Flickr for her beautiful Polaroid photography (and scored press coverage and several commissions and exhibitions).
• Brandon is addicted to film and relies on Yahoo! Movies on his iPhone for ratings and reviews (and incidentally is one of the youngest patent holders in the US).
• Valerie used a Freecycle group on Yahoo! Groups to outfit her classroom with free stuff (including a clawfoot bathtub the kids read in).
• Larry admits to spending about two hours a day managing his teams on Yahoo! Fantasy Sports.
• Emily loves looking things up on Yahoo! Search, like where dimples come from and why the starling is the most hated bird in the world.
• Thomas gets sucked into Yahoo! News daily, digging that one minute he can read about the elections in Afghanistan and then stumble on something about the depletion of ants in the Amazon rainforest.

Connecting with real people, real users, to hear what they love, hate and need about using our products is what we’re all about. As our new brand campaign stipulates, Yahoo! is about you. All you.

Stay tuned for standalone video profiles of these great voices and more.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Next week, we will launch what will be Yahoo!’s single-largest global integrated marketing campaign ever. I gave a sneak preview today as part of Yahoo!’s presence at Advertising Week in New York City. (Think advertising meets Fashion Week.)

The core of our message will focus on YOU. It will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. That’s because Yahoo! really is all about you — we’re constantly evolving to give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. We want you to make the Web your own and are designing products to put you in the driver’s seat of your Internet experience. Our new brand positioning reflects that.

Our campaign will kick off in the U.S. on Monday, September 28, expand to the U.K. and India on October 5, and reach other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan. We’re quite serious about our vision to be the center of people’s online lives. You’ll find us what might seem like everywhere online, on network and cable TV, on the radio, in print, and outdoor.

Why now? We are relentlessly focused on making the Web more personally relevant for you. We’ve backed that up with major product enhancements during the past few months. We recently updated Mail and Messenger with new tools and features. In the week ahead, our new homepage — the epitome of openness and personalization — will be broadly available in a number of global markets. And, today, we’re debuting the new Yahoo! Search experience. Of course, there’s plenty more to come, and although we’re still one of the most recognizable brands in the world, now’s the time to start retelling our great story and revitalizing our bond with people.

I should also note that people like you helped shape the message of this new campaign. We conducted a massive research effort that involved focus groups with thousands of people in seven countries. It helped us confirm that a brand refresh was in order, that people crave an answer to “What is Yahoo! all about?”, and that, although we’ve drifted apart a bit, people around the world still want to love Yahoo!.

This is much more than an advertising campaign. It’s our promise to you that your life online will become more personal and more meaningful with Yahoo!. We believe we offer the only Web experience that converges your personal world and the world at large to create integrated, personally relevant experiences. And it sets the direction for how we will deliver awesome new experiences and continue to push the frontiers of science and technology to invent Web products and services that will dazzle you for years to come.

You’ll hear lots more about the campaign in the coming weeks. Be sure to check back on Monday when we pull back the curtain. We look forward to hearing what you think. We want you to get more out of the Web, so you can get more out of life.

Elisa Steele
EVP & Chief Marketing Officer

Back in July, I posted here about the $1 million Netflix Prize and the amazing accomplishment of one of our senior research scientists, Yehuda Koren. At the time, Yehuda and a team of academic and industry researchers from around the world had cracked the mythical 10-percent threshold in the contest – making their team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, contenders for the grand prize. In a dramatic turn of events at the finish line, the team ended up tied with another group of researchers that submitted a similar improvement later that same day.

But today, at a press conference in New York, after verifying the results with their top technical brass, Netflix officially declared Yehuda and his team the grand prize champions. To achieve this honor, they bested 41,305 teams from 186 countries.

To reiterate, this was no easy feat. Every person in the world has a different taste in movies. Yehuda, for example, loves the Godfather, but is not much of a James Bond fan (whether it’s Connery, Moore, Daulton, Brosnan, Craig, or the other guy). And it’s not just Yehuda — everyone has personal tastes that don’t perfectly correspond to box office results, DVD sales, or Academy Awards. As a result, figuring out what movies should be recommended to you is an intense scientific problem.

In fact, it is such an impressive piece of research that Yehuda’s paper detailing one of his main contributions to the prize-winning team won the best paper award at KDD-09 (otherwise know as 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining).

It’s too complicated a paper to summarize here with any justice, but let me give you the gist: Yehuda figured out that the way people rate movies on Netflix changes over time and, in some cases, from day to day. In other words, not only do my tastes “mature” and shift, but so do my moods. For example, on a Monday, perhaps out of frustration with having to be back in the office, maybe I’m a little harsh on the movie I watched Sunday night, which I give a 1-star rating in spite of it not being that terrible. On the other hand, that film I saw with my kids when we were on vacation – the one that had them laughing all night — gets a warm-hearted 5 stars when it wasn’t exactly an aesthetic masterpiece. Yehuda laid down the research to mathematically model this phenomenon and it’s a major reason why his team cracked the code to get over 10-percent.

Ultimately, this exactly why we founded Yahoo! Labs — to encourage Yahoos to think outside of our own sandbox and contribute to industry-wide technical and scientific challenges that will some day make your online life easier. Sometimes that means just making sure there’s less spam in your email inbox and — in this case — making sure that your Netflix queue is filled with movies you’re really going to like.

• New York Times – Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest
• Forbes – The Netflix R&D Game
• Fortune – Box office boffo for brainiacs: The Netflix Prize

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

During Fashion Week, fashionistas exalt haute couture with models, runways, paparazzi, and the latest fashion trends. During Advertising Week, the stars of Madison Avenue celebrate creativity with keynotes, awards, parties, and general mingling of brilliant marketing minds.

This week, Manhattan will be abuzz with thousands of brand stewards and creative types, coming together to pay tribute to the best in advertising and share visions about what the future brings. And Yahoo! will be there in force – helping marketers understand how to make the most of the online medium.

In honor of the occasion, CEO Carol Bartz and a bevy of senior Yahoo! executives rang the opening bell at NASDAQ this morning. Here’s video to prove it:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Avast, me hearties! Yon ‘morrow is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. If’n ye’d like to bellow like a true buccaneer, ye best be practicin’ smartly ‘fore the dawn. “Yes” tis an “aye,” “no” tis a “nay,” yer neighbor tis a “bilge rat,” an’ yer boss be a “scallywag.” “Wow” be “blimey!” an’ “gangway!” is what ye yells from yer car window. An’ ye best learn how to chat like a pirate, too. Here’s what we got shipshape this week:

• Unleash your inner curator: If you’re a photo nut, it’s easy to get sucked into exploring the more than 3.4 billion photos on Flickr. And if you’ve ever wanted to collect and horde your favorites by theme, have we got a new feature for you. Introducing Flickr Galleries, which gives members a handy way to celebrate the creativity of their fellow photographer. You can curate together up to 18 public photos or videos in one place – Big Ben, blue eyes, snails, cats with thumbs, mannequins, what have you. To get started, just click on the “Add to Gallery” icon on the menu bar. Just five days out of the gate and it’s a very popular feature – you’ve created more than 25,000 galleries to date. More here.
• Out with the old: The Messenger team has news for anyone using Yahoo! Messenger versions 6.0 through 7.5. As of September 30th, we’ll be retiring those oldies. If you’re using anything below 8.0, you’ll find you won’t be able to sign in. That’s the price of progress, right? (We wouldn’t want you to be that guy still using a mobile phone with an antennae.) While Messenger 9.0 and the beta of Messenger 10 are rich in features like video sharing, full-screen video chat, spam protection, and more, we realize people like options. So after September 30th, you can also try Yahoo! Messenger for the Web or the IM built into Yahoo! Mail. More here.
• Celebrate en Español: In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Yahoo! En Español has teamed up with Kodak to invite Latinos – and Latinos at heart – to “Muestra Tu Herencia” (Show Your Heritage). Folks are invited to upload photos of friends and family through October 31st as well as leave comments. For every photo uploaded, Yahoo! and Kodak will donate $4 to the Hispanic College Fund (up to $20,000). And as of October 12th, we’ll unveil a digital photo mosaic of all the submitted photos as a tribute to Hispanic families across the U.S. Muchas gracias!

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Today, of course, is the eighth anniversary of the September 11th attacks in NYC, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. To ensure we never forget, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum just put out a call for people from around the globe to “Make History” with their images, videos, and stories as a permanent digital archive. Here’s how we made history this week:

• F-F-Fantastic phone apps: For the millions of you with touch-screen phones, you can now download some of Yahoo!’s most popular services. Call them the Three F’s: Finance, Flickr and Fantasy Football (or is that four Fs?). With interactivity reminiscent of their Web-based counterparts, these apps let you access our services on the go from an iPhone, iPod touch or select Blackberry models (including Bold, Tour and 8900 series). For now, Finance and Fantasy Football users can download them in the U.S. and Canada, while the Flickr app is also available in the UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For a deeper dive, check out our post earlier this week.
• Inviting apps & jumbo files: The new and improved Yahoo! Mail just debuted three new apps that turn your inbox into even more of a productivity hub. Head over to that handy Applications box and you’ll notice new apps from Evite and pingg — two options for sending and managing invitations. They sensibly integrate with tools like Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Maps to take the stress out of party-planning (and -going). And the new Attach Large Files app, courtesy of the folks at drop.io, lets you upload and share files up to 100MB. You can also collaborate by commenting on files, leaving a voicemail for more context or dialing in to a conference call for a real-time powwow. Read more here.
• Neighbors helping neighbors: Let’s say that waffle iron you plugged in blew your kitchen fuse and it’s been a blue moon since you last called an electrician. Where do you turn? The best tips are often from the people you bump into every day in your neighborhood. And we’ve just made it easier to get their word-of-mouth recommendations. Yahoo! Neighbors, a new feature on Yahoo! Local, lets you get answers to everyday problems. Use it to find local services or post questions and tips for the community. For a taste, check out this thread from some users in Dallas in search of a driving school.
• New souped-up Messenger for Mac: For all you Mac users, there’s a new beta version of Messenger available for download. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 comes with a bunch of new bug fixes to help it run more smoothly. You’ll also get the Messenger Insider window that’s available on Windows versions, giving you a daily snapshot of what’s happening on Yahoo! and around the world. Want to take it for a test drive? Download it here and read more here.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Can you remember when a mobile phone was just used for making calls? Did you ever think that you would have access to the Internet, photos, video, music, and more in something size of a deck of cards? For technology companies, advances in mobile have created playgrounds for building some pretty amazing consumer experiences – the kind that make you forget you’re not sitting in front of your PC.

Today we’re taking a huge step in bringing more of Yahoo!’s most popular properties and services to mobile devices around the world. You can now have Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr, with much of the same interactivity as on the PC, on your iPhone or iPod touch (via the App Store) and select BlackBerry models (Bold, Tour, and 8900 series). It’s all part of our effort to help you stay connected.

The new Yahoo! Finance app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, helps you stay on top of the market, your portfolio, and the latest news, research, and analysis with powerful interactivity. The app lets you:

• Follow the broad market indices or a specific company
• Access the top financial news stories
• Follow your personalized portfolio from Yahoo! Finance
• Drill down into specific company information (news, chart, financial metrics)
• Get currency conversions on the go
• Watch streaming video from Tech Ticker

The new app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada and we expect to support more languages and countries in the near future, so stay tuned!

The new Fantasy Football app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, ensures that when you’re away from your computer or TV, you’ll still be in the know when your team puts points on the board. You’ll have up-to-the-minute access to rosters, players, live scores via Stat Tracker, and the latest expert analysis and news. The new app lets you:

• Edit your bench (add and drop) directly from your phone
• View matchups, standings, player and team stats, etc.
• Get live scoring just like on the PC
• Get news and expert advice just like you’re used to on the PC

This app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada – those football-loving nations.

Flickr fans will be amazed by the functionality in their new Flickr iPhone/iPod touch app – starting with the Ken Burns-effect on famed Flickr images when you first launch it. In addition to being able to share and discover photos and videos, you can also take advantage of location-based information when uploading new stuff. The new app lets you:

• Easily upload and tag photos and video while on the go
• Automatically geo-tag before you upload (opt-in required)
• Add and view photos and videos by tags & sets
• Share photos with friends via email
• Search photos and videos from the Flickr community all over the world by subject, people, or places
• See your contacts’ recent photos and activity
• Make comments and mark photos as favorites

The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore – with more to come.

And don’t despair if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod touch or one of the compatible BlackBerry devices. You can always access these three popular services from the mobile web – just head to Flickr (http://m.flickr.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://m.yahoo.com/finance), and Fantasy Sports (http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy). And be sure to visit the new Yahoo! Mobile Homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) and personalize it with your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

Keep an eye out for additional mobile offerings across a lot more devices as we continue to bring the best of Yahoo! to mobile users around the world.

David Ko
SVP, Yahoo! Mobile