Under new management…yours

Posted September 22nd, 2009 at 8:00 am by Elisa Steele, Chief Marketing Officer

 23 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

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

Tagged: advertising

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23 Comments Add your own

Marc | September 22nd, 2009 at 8:12 am

Nice. I think this captures what the web is all about now, which is user contributed content and personalisation. It’s nice to see someone as large as Yahoo! recognising this and presenting the brand as such.

Good work.

Roman Kirillov | September 22nd, 2009 at 8:13 am

Lisa, thanks for a great presentation yesterday – we all really enjoyed it; also very delighted to see that finally some steps are done towards right direction. Of course, it lefts lots of stuff to be done, inconsistencies to get rid of, new markets to come to, new features to add and bugs to fix – but it seems like the first step is done. Thanks again!

Thomas Hawk | September 22nd, 2009 at 11:33 am

Elisa,

Thank you for this refreshing commitment to your Yahoo! users. It’s quite obvious to those of us reading this blog post that as you write, this indeed is much more than an advertising campaign.

I took a few minutes to write up my own response to your excellent post on my blog here:

http://thomashawk.com/2009/09/an-open-letter-to-elisa-steele-evp-chief-marketing-officer-yahoo-inc.html

Yours Truly,

Thomas Hawk

Michael Beavers | September 22nd, 2009 at 12:03 pm

Congrats! Love that there is a fresh, global scope to the brand. Good luck with everything.

Joe Hunkins | September 22nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm

Great idea. As a shareholder and long term Yahoo watcher I’m glad to see efforts to leverage Yahoo’s huge social networking footprint. However it’ll take more than snappy branding and unless there is a powerful back end technology supporting this it’ll fail as badly as earlier efforts.

I hope you start treating Flickr more like the great social platform it’s come to be.

Brinke | September 22nd, 2009 at 3:28 pm

The new look looks great. New sleek search and front page UI, the unexpected facelift in Mail (it literally updated while I was using it..I went, ‘what?’ Now if I could only get the clunky AT&T co-branding offa there………)

There IS an audience that is passionate for the product. I was amazed at the response from the Gmail user base when it went down a few weeks ago. A disaster of Biblical scope. Rightly or wrongly,they have a passion for the product, don’t they? Fine. Now how can you get a response like that from YOUR user base? (You don’t want to have a massive mail crash to generate that fevered pitch, but the flipside is, you DO end up knowing you matter..that you’re relevant.)

Yahoo! users feel the same way about “their” brand. Reach down and tap that core. That’s what will energize the company. It’s OK to say it: “Yahoo! is cool.”

As Captain Picard once said when he would decide on a plan for the Enterprise- “Engage.”

Shuan Lo | September 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 pm

So… Y! actually required “a massive research effort that involved focus groups with thousands of people in seven countries” to confirm that nobody knows what Y! is all about… very interesting indeed…

Bjorn | September 22nd, 2009 at 9:04 pm

I’m glad you posted Thomas Hawks comments. While I don’t necessarily like the way he makes his point at times, I do think that there are a fair number of flickr users who share some frustration and concern over the policies.

Personally, I’m no longer a “pro” user. I don’t see myself spending money and investing effort in a site that seems to have random enforcement of policies. I’m sure at times I can seem to the moderators that they are herding cats, however, I don’t think it excuses the account deletions and actions towards paying customers.

Hopefully at some point someone at Yahoo! will wake up to the fact that flickr is still a leading product in the line up, perhaps the only one. I use google for mail, blogging, calendar, chat … I’m sure there is more. Flickr is the only Yahoo! product I use regularly and I’ve certainly cut back on that as well lately.

Best of luck on the new effort.

Katja | September 22nd, 2009 at 11:15 pm

What creative agency is responsible for the campaign? Think this should be mentioned in an official press release…

Nicki Dugan | September 23rd, 2009 at 3:28 pm

Katja, the creative work was handled by Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Baldy | September 23rd, 2009 at 7:59 pm

If Yahoo! is under new management and it’s mine, I ask my underlings to clean up bots from chat rooms.

robert szombati | September 24th, 2009 at 1:09 am

I’d really like to know what the future plans are for the Yahoo! Messenger Power User Program. I wasn’t chosen to be a part of that program (although I’m using Y! Messenger for so many years now) but that’s no problem hence some of my buddies already have that rank and they keep me up to date with all the Y!M Power User News.

I think it would be a good idea to keep the Yahoo! Messenger Power User program alive mainly because of the great Live Customer support for Yahoo! Messenger which, in my opinion, can be very useful in many situations.

aidy | September 24th, 2009 at 5:24 am

I agree with baldy on the above comment. And user names sticking in list after people have left room.
But generally the bots in rooms is way out of contol again.

aidy | September 24th, 2009 at 5:26 am

Also on yahoo.co.uk for about month now when you go to look at news items it comes up with cant find the story, for about hour when first put up if someone could look at that :):) cheers

Bruiser | September 24th, 2009 at 8:31 am

If this “new” Yahoo is all about the users, then why have you ignored the users when it comes to Profiles? The changes there have been a debacle. Hardly anyone uses it now, and it continues to lose more users every day. Take some time to read the comments over the last year.

There’s a reason this company is falling to the wayside, and if you follow the Profiles changes, you can see why.

aidypost | September 24th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

Have to agree with bruiser there they were messed, up and just sort of left in end

aidypost | September 24th, 2009 at 3:40 pm

one other thing voice bans for 20 mins or more if you jump rooms too much on chat can be a pain as well.
Apart from that yahoo i happy

Lorenzo | September 27th, 2009 at 8:55 am

If Y! was mine then I’d get tech support to fix problems report instead of just acknowledging site problems exist.

Charlie Anzman | October 1st, 2009 at 7:47 am

Still lots of potential for Yahoo!. The landscape needs competition and while it’s sad to see search go to Bing (search needs ongoing competition), maybe those resources can be used to re-engage some new gen users (and the media) as Yahoo! seems to be doing at the new website …. http://youandyahoo.com/

Seth Wisely | October 4th, 2009 at 9:51 pm

Will “You” (and you) give first consideration to MY privacy?

If not you can keep your ‘you’ to yourself.

:)

Steve | October 8th, 2009 at 10:18 am

The guy in the ad jumping with the skateboard is crazy. You should have done some research with skateboarders or a skateboard company. Anyone can tell that he is not doing an ollie or a nollie.

cHARIty | October 19th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

Congradulations on the great global campaign work..

I saw the new Ad hoardings on the old Bangalore Aiport road last week and they already seem to have struck a cord with with the young techie crowds of Bangalore..

CHariTY

Dave Clay | October 29th, 2009 at 12:47 pm

I did not get the TV ad I saw. It was the one that starts with Las Vegas showgirls with the message Yahoo=you. What impression of Yahoo was it intended to leave? That it is customizable to my personal needs? I did not get that from the ad. I just got “the internet contains interesting stuff”. This is how the ad speaks to a Yahoo user. How is it supposed to speak to a google or msn user? Maybe I just don’t get “brand awareness”

Second, image is only part of the problem. I am concerned about Yahoo technology not keeping pace with google. I like Yahoo’s mail interface, but Yahoo does not support imap, and I cannot synch my Palm with Yahoo address book. Little missing pieces like these add up. Android will probably work pretty seamlessly with google mail/address book. What is Yahoo’s answer in the mobile space? I think the mobile-portal link will be ever more critical going forward.