Thankfully, many of us who work at Yahoo! believe that we have the best job in the company. If I based my hubris on other people who tell me I have the best job at Yahoo!, I see experiential marketing rise above all others to the top of the heap.

I lead a small team that is responsible for complementing and amplifying marketing projects — for consumers and B2B audiences — by creating rich 1:1 experiences that provide a moment of pause, reflection, and engagement with our brand in ways that support our digital marketing efforts, but provide a differentiated offline approach. These experiences establish emotional bonds between our audience and Yahoo!’s products and services, and put a human “face” to our brand in a way that online marketing may not.

Some of the recent projects we have supported include 2010’s Ask America program and 2011’s launch of the latest Yahoo! Mail. We also get to think hard about brand marketing challenges like how to keep Yahoo!’s trademark “yodel” in the hearts and minds of consumers. On our plate for the coming year are efforts to engage voters across the country with Yahoo! News in the countdown to the presidential election, launching Tom Hanks’ “Electric City,” and global marketing support for the 2012 Olympics.

We hold our programs to an important set of guiding principles:

1. Assure that every experience is built to drive traffic back to Yahoo! or change the perception of our brand
2. Create sharable experiences and provide the tools for users to share
3. Provide “hands-on” experiences
4. Engage our audiences with surprising, relevant, smile-inducing experiences

No surprise that the word experience appears in every principle, right? Not every program at Yahoo! is right for experiential efforts: we are not a scalable acquisition channel, and, in fact, creating offline manifestations of our online product experiences are not always effective in public settings. Instead, we look for opportunities to draw related connections between an offline experience and our online products and services.

Perfect case in point: the 2011 launch of the latest version of Yahoo! Mail. We were a small part of the overall launch marketing plan for the product, but we were an extremely visible component. Our objective was specifically not to provide users with a chance to try the new Mail. Instead, our role was to alleviate potential apprehension about the planned migration from older versions of Mail to the new version—and we wanted to drive positive buzz and word of mouth by creating a fun experience that would enhance consumers’ personal connection to the product and leave them with the feeling that “Yahoo! is the best thing that happened to me today.” In other words: kindness always wins, while talking about our spam protection on a street corner may not.

Our solution was two-pronged.  First, we dispatched 20 Yahoo! Mail Carriers (kitted out bike messengers) in Chicago and New York who were tasked with creating that random act of kindness. They handed unsuspecting users a large Yahoo! Mail “super envelope” that contained something for them — a Starbucks gift card, or a packet of wildflower seeds — and an additional duplicate gift for them to share with a friend. This interaction brought to life the Yahoo! Mail promise that the product facilitated connections with those people who matter most to you. Consumers loved the surprising gift from Yahoo! Mail, and they shared the gifts and their positive experience with their friends and family.

The second prong of our approach became a viral sensation — internally amongst fellow Yahoos who were busting a nut to launch the new Mail; and externally with consumers who got to interact with a 6-foot-tall talking purple mailbox.

Yes, you heard me. A talking mailbox, affectionately dubbed The Yahoo! Purple People Greeter, who stood on street corners in Brooklyn and Manhattan doling out bon mots, along with personally relevant gifts in a Yahoo! Mail super envelope: a pair of flip flops for someone on their way to buy shoes, a harmonica for a musician, a dog bone for a pet owner, and an iPad for a grad student. How did an inanimate purple box know enough to have such relevant gifts on hand, who to distribute them to, or just what to say to make people laugh, jump and even cry with joy? That’s a secret the experiential team will take to our grave. Or, you could just take us to lunch and we’ll probably give up the goods.

But most importantly, the experience worked. We made people’s days. We heard, and kept, some deep dark secrets. But most importantly, we turned our interactions with a relatively small number of individuals into compelling, hilarious, highly entertaining video content, which we then distributed on Yahoo! and via social channels.

After our rewarding experience in New York, we hit the road with our large purple friend. To Chicago where the mailbox sweltered and relied on the cold water of strangers, to Austin where he rocked out at Emo’s and tried (unsuccessfully) to crowd surf during a performance by Futurebirds, and ultimately to San Francisco where we arrived just in time to fuel Giants playoff fever with many sets of tickets to the World Series champs’ final games of the season.

Our social media channels loved the Purple Mailbox and we generated significant positive sentiment for Yahoo! Mail and our brand as a whole. We turned these impromptu consumer experiences into high-quality digital content that drove engagement with our brand both on- and off-network. And we gave employees an opportunity to laugh, cheer and smile during a transitional time for our company.

Our competitors don’t have a purple talking mailbox who makes people laugh. Nor do they regularly engage consumers in surprising, yet relevant offline locales. Yahoo! understands that marketing takes on many forms, and they all work together to drive success for our company and engagement with our users. Especially those that are six-feet-tall and purple. I love my job.

Andrew Strickman,
Sr. Director, Experiential Marketing

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.

The sweeps will run from March 8th thru April 8th on The Thread’s Facebook page where viewers can enter via a simple entry form. At the end of the month long period, three winners will be selected via random drawing and flown to New York merely weeks later for some ultimate pampering.

TO ENTER: http://www.facebook.com/yahoothethread

The Thread, Yahoo’s premier fashion program, airs weekly on Shine, Yahoo’s online destination geared towards women.

Today, we are excited to make the new Yahoo! Local available in limited beta. With rich hyper-local content, this new product provides people a truly personalized experience across desktop and mobile (currently available via the mobile web on iPhone and Android), enabling them to discover and contribute to the best local news, deals, and events nearby, all in one place.

Our goal with the new Yahoo! Local is to be the best place for people to find what’s happening in their neighborhoods, whether they’re at home or on the go.  As some of you may have noticed, we’re beta testing the experience in more than 30 neighborhoods and cities in the U.S., including San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Brooklyn, NY as well as Birmingham, Ferndale, and Royal Oak in Michigan. We did this so that we can evolve the product quickly and enhance it based on a cross-section of user feedback and insights. You can access the new experience from your desktop or mobile phone by visiting: http://beta.local.yahoo.com.

Giving You the Best Local News and Information

When it comes to the best local news and information, we’re delivering relevant hyper-local neighborhood and city content created by the community, local publishers, and Yahoo! editors.  We’re featuring content from the best local blogs and newspapers.  And through a completely open ecosystem, we’re making it possible for any local publisher to be part of the new Yahoo! Local. By leveraging the power of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, the entire community can participate and publish stories on topics that matter to them. Individuals and organizations can also add events that are relevant to the local community.

Saving Money in Your Area

We are also fulfilling our commitment to personal relevance by delivering the best locally relevant offers from nearby spas, restaurants, and retailers – helping you save some cash while you support local businesses. This new hyper-local experience integrates our recently launched Local Offers program to provide consumers quick, easy access to the widest selection of local deals and offers from partners such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot and more.

Convergence of Content and Advertising

There is a unique intersection between the content users find useful and what marketers want to advertise – especially in a local experience – and we recognize that. With the new Yahoo! Local we are fundamentally changing how users will interact with local content, including advertising. As we build out the experience, we’re exploring and experimenting with various advertising solutions that will enable our advertising partners to reach their target users.

What’s Under the Hood

Technology is at the heart of everything we do at Yahoo! This experience leverages our powerful geo-informatics and content enrichment platforms, including Where On Earth (WOE) and Placemaker, to identify and geo-tag every news story that appears on every page down to the neighborhood level.

During the coming weeks and months, you will see us continually improve and expand our new hyper-local product by rolling it out to more neighborhoods and cities and adding new features that will make this the best local starting point for our users.

Take the experience for a spin around the neighborhood and tell us what you think. Stay tuned for much more from the new Yahoo! Local.

Matt Idema

VP, Yahoo! Local

Pride celebrations have come a long way since June 1970. What began as small, vocal demonstrations in a handful of large US cities has since grown to hundreds of major parades in most metropolitan areas around the globe, as well as countless smaller celebrations, film festivals and cultural events that attract people in cities and towns all over. To find events near you and to explore the most comprehensive online map of LGBT pride anywhere, head on over to the Pride Event Finder at pride.yahoo.com.

Yahoo! is celebrating Pride again this year with messages on our corporate billboards in Times Square, New York City and San Francisco. We’re also thrilled to be a Premier Sponsor of Frameline, the 34^th Annual San Francisco LGBT Film Festival. The Yahoo! logo has been up on the marquee of the historic Castro Theatre throughout the 10-day festival and we couldn’t be happier!

The past year has seen some important developments for Yahoo!’s tens of millions of LGBT users. In the United States, the nearly decade-old proposed legislation commonly referred to as the “Matthew Shepard Act” was enacted this past October, extending federal hate crime protection to victims based upon sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. It was the first federal law of any kind to extend to recognition of transgendered individuals in the country.

Outside of the US, pride celebrations have continued to flourish, growing in number particularly throughout Asia and South America. Sao Paulo, Brazil continues its record of having the world’s largest LGBT Pride Parade, with an estimated 3.2 million attendees last month. It is second in popularity only behind the annual Formula One races in that city.

The LGBT community has also recently seen same sex marriage legalized in the state of New Hampshire, in Mexico City, and in Portugal and Iceland. India decriminalized homosexuality for the first time since British Colonial rule imposed the law in the mid-nineteenth century. Bans on gays in the military were ended in Argentina, Philippines and Uruguay. Iceland elected the first openly gay head of state in the world when Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Prime Minister. And Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston, Texas, which made that city the largest in the United States to have an openly gay leader.

Congratulations on all the advancements for the LGBT community in the past year and we look forward to celebrating further improvements with you in the future.

Yahoo! wishes you and your loved ones a happy LGBT Pride season 2010!

So, what does it take to navigate a 77-foot-long, 430-pound Spiderman balloon through the streets of New York while millions of people are watching on live television?

Jodie, who is director of platform business strategy for Yahoo’s Right Media, is about to find out.

Although this will be Jodie’s 8th year participating in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it will be her first as a captain of a big, new balloon. And she’ll be guiding the first balloon of the day, no less.

Jodie, who reports that you need good running shoes, muscles, a sense of humor and a bit of technical training to take on the volunteer job, gave us a behind-the-scenes peek at the preparations for the big event.

While the rest of us will have to tune in to NBC or CBS at 9 a.m. Thursday morning to cheer Jodie on, her New York Yahoo colleagues will have prime seats for the festivities.  For the first time in its 83-year history, the parade will pass by the Yahoo! building!

Good luck to Jodie–and Happy Thanksgiving from Yahoo!

Yahoo! helps you connect with the people and things that matter most to you – wherever you are, including in Times Square.  While Yahoo! is the place where your world meets the world online, over 500,000 of you take in Times Square each day and it’s become a central spot for New Yorkers and people around the world.  We and our partners at the Times Square Alliance think it’s the perfect place to bring you free WiFi service (check out the landing page here)- for  New Yawkers enjoying your cawfee breaks and out-of-towners enjoying the Big Apple. Fuggedaboutit!

And don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop in Times Square – you can also access the service from your WiFi-enabled mobile phone. All you need to do is enable the WiFi feature on your phone, open your browser and click on the “Get Started” button on the mobile landing page. This will take you to Yahoo!’s mobile homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) where you can access your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

So, if you are  in New York City or will be anytime during the next year, come down (or up, depending on where you’ll be coming from) to Times Square to chat, play, search, and enjoy whatever else you do online with free WiFi service from Yahoo! and the Times Square Alliance.  And it’s all about Y!ou (in case you hadn’t heard).

Kelly Delaney
Buzz Marketing

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