Don’t adjust your monitor. There’s something different about Yahoo!. Everything seems so… purple. That’s because over the past few months we’ve been quietly changing the color scheme of our logos as part of a widespread campaign that we expect to complete by mid-2010. Say goodbye to the red logos that have adorned our sites for most of our existence and say hello to purple as Yahoo! enters a new chapter in its history.
For Yahoo! employees, this isn’t new. We’ve been bleeding purple since 1996 when we anointed it as our corporate color. Why purple? Lore has it that our notoriously frugal co-founder, David Filo, got a great deal on lavender paint for our decrepit offices. But ultimately, purple evokes everything that makes working here so unique. Now we want to share that energy with you. As we give our sites a new purple glow, it seems appropriate to reflect on how far our brand has come since our beginnings in 1994. Here’s a retrospective of the Yahoo! logo and its evolution over the past 15 years.
1994: No logo
In the beginning, Yahoo! didn’t have a logo. In fact, Yahoo! wasn’t even Yahoo!. Our cofounders, two Stanford University grad students procrastinating on their dissertations, created a directory of their favorite Web sites and called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Web.” It was simple, practical and easy to use. It wasn’t until later that year that Yahoo! became the official name of the company.
1995: The jumping "Y" guy
After Yahoo! went from a hobby to a start-up, we needed something to adorn our office door and company t-shirts. The jumping “Y” guy was born. Designed by David Shen, our 17th employee and the lone design guy in the office, the logo shows a person jumping for joy after finding what he needs on Yahoo!. The blue circle over which the “Y” guy is leaping represents the world. Today, the “Y” guy no longer graces our hallways and conference rooms, but if you’re lucky you might see him on a business card from an old-timer. Later that year, Shen partnered with ad agency Organic Online to design the logotype. Yahoo! needed a horizontal logo because it took up less space than the more vertical jumping “Y” guy. Shen and Organic made sure the letters rose towards the right “so that, upon reading the word, you would get a sense of rising energy with the exclamation point punctuating that energy at the end,” according to Shen. They eventually settled on Able font, which they modified and made purple.
1995: Going red on the Web
We decided the logo on our page needed some life, so in 1995 we decided on a logo that was bright red. This wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. We also chose it because red would more reliably display across different monitors and computers, which at that time was an issue for other colors. We also liked red for its boldness.
1996: New year, new logo
After much tweaking and refining, we launched the red Yahoo! logo across all of our sites on January 1, 1996.
1996: Purple on the inside
While red became the face of Yahoo! to our users, internally we were redesigning the logo. In 1996, we parted ways with the jumping “Y” guy and streamlined the logo to the now famous purple type-based version. Since then, we’ve been using the purple logo on everything from posters to cookies to the soles of flip flops that leave Yahoo! imprints in the sand.
1997-2004: The big bang theory
Yahoo!’s abbreviated logo, affectionately known as the “Y-Bang” (“bang” is typesetter’s slang for exclamation point), was originally developed in 1997 for a button on the Yahoo! Toolbar that links to the front page (the full Yahoo! emblem was too wide to fit). In 2004 we partnered with ad agency Ogilvy to redesign the Y-Bang and created a version with a white “Y” inside a purple oval and a purple exclamation point next to it. The purple Y-Bang is now the official abbreviated logo that you will see throughout our sites.
2009: Painting the world purple
Yahoo! is launching a new homepage with our new purple logo. We are also extending the logo to every page on our network, all of our company communications and all of our partnerships. Standardizing around the purple logo will create a consistent experience for Yahoo! users, advertisers and employees, and it will strengthen our brand going into the next decade. Go purple!
Glenn Tokunaga
Art Director and Senior Brand Specialist
Today’s post comes to you in the “cool stuff” category. After the debut of our new campaign video, mashup artist Mike Relm had his way with it. With five screens, five projectors, two turntables, one zoetrope with dozens of hand-cut photos, and one historic ballroom in San Francisco, Mike remixed our video and gave it a whole new life.
Quick – who said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”? That’s right, Mahatma Gandhi and today would have been his 140th birthday. Take a little time to honor his legacy by celebrating justice, tolerance and creating change through nonviolent resistance. Here’s the kind of change we enacted this week:
Homepage is more apptastic: If you’ve been playing with our new homepage apps, you’ve discovered our gallery of recommended apps. This week, we added more than a dozen new ones, with more to come. You can balance your personal budget with Mint, learn how to pair the right wine with your meal with an app from MyRecipes and Snooth, discover weekly deals at Target, get movie info from Flixster, or manage posts and comments on your WordPress blog — all from the Yahoo! Homepage. And because we’ve opened it up to third-party developers, expect that list to grow. More on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
New Yahoo! Search: Notice anything different about Yahoo! Search? After a month of testing, we’ve rolled out a brand new Yahoo! Search that ups the ante in personal relevance. You’ll see new tools that let you explore related concepts; display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and IMDB; and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums. We also give you quick access to our Search Scan/SafeSearch tool, to protect you from viruses, spyware and spam, and Search Pad, which lets you take notes during your queries. More on the Yahoo! Search blog.
Yahoo! Messenger kills bugs dead: The bug hunters on the Messenger team have released new versions of both Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta as well as Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone. In the former, they’ve fixed issues with webcam detection, added messaging to tell you when your friend needs to upgrade versions, offer better handling of unanswered calls, and explain when your Internet connection downgrades you to a voice call. Over on the iPhone, they’ve addressed the mysterious contact list disappearances. Download the upgrade in the iTunes App Store. More here and here on the Yahoo! Messenger blog.
Zimbra milestone: Ok, what do Zimbra and South Africa have in common? People. Fifty million of them now have paid Zimbra mailboxes, just a bit more than the population of Africa’s most southerly nation That milestone comes amidst the launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, which now lets you more easily sync to your mobile, read and write emails with tabbed views, create presentations without external software, receive read email receipts, choose from among calendar views, and remotely wipe your phone if you lose it, among other features. More over on the Zimbra blog.
In 1992, I was diagnosed with breast cancer – days after I started as CEO at my last gig at Autodesk.
I feel lucky to be here sharing this with you today.
But many women are not so fortunate. The effects this disease has on those diagnosed are devastating. It’s a horrible, gut-wrenching experience, physically and emotionally. And we’re still losing the battle. Breast cancer affects 1.3 million women every year – far too many mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, friends and co-workers.
That’s why this month, Yahoo! is getting involved. Some companies let you send in yogurt tops for donations or ask you to contribute at the cash register (all worthy efforts), but we wanted to do something only Yahoo! can. So we’re teaming up with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). For each person who updates their pink ribbon status on Yahoo! Shine and Yahoo! Mail this month, we’ll donate $1 to the NBCF (up to $50,000).
The donations will go toward free mammograms for uninsured women, in the hopes that they can benefit from early diagnosis and treatment as I did. It’s a simple way to raise awareness and empower our community of users to make a positive impact in the fight against breast cancer.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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:
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!
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!.
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.
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.
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.
A look inside the big purple house of Yahoo!, where we'll provide insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things we think about in the shower. Learn more.
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