San Francisco — Web pioneer Yahoo Inc., on Tuesday announced a new $100 million dollar global marketing strategy at the MIXX Expo in New York to promote the company brand by focusing on “You,” whose last starring role was on the cover of Time Magazine in 2006 as the “Person of the Year,” in a move by Chief Executive Carol Bartz to remake the struggling Internet company.
Yahoo’s chief marketing officer Elisa Steele rolled out what is definitely a new $100 million, world-wide advertising campaign focused around the phrase “It’s Y!ou,” to underline what she outlined as a new direction: Our vision is to be at the nucleus of people’s online lives — an importance on customizing the web experience for each user with a combination of content from “My World,” consisting of a user’s friends and interests, and “The World,” comprised of general-interest information.
The core of Yahoo’s first-ever global branding campaign is the message “It’s Y!ou.”
“This is much more than an advertising campaign,” Steele added. “It is about how Yahoo delivers its promise to the market in everything we do. Our brand strategy shows our commitment to delivering personally relevant online experiences.”
Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz at press conference in New York said, “really is committed to being the center of people’s lives online.”
If nothing much, Yahoo’s ad plans should simply help counter fears of declining online ad spending.
The slogan of the campaign, “You” or “Y!ou” as Yahoo writes it, features ad copy like “The Internet is under new management. Yours.” And “The Internet now has a personality. Yours.” It aims to underscore the shift toward socially-oriented computing services that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo have made over the past few years in response to the popularity of Facebook and MySpace.
The ad campaign, which will include offline and online media in 10 countries, including the United Kingdom, India, Brazil and Hong Kong, is “It’s Y!ou."
The ad campaign, which kicks off from Monday, September 28 in the US and on October 5 in the UK and India, with ads underlining how services like Yahoo’s home page and mail can help consumers manage their information online, and will last for at least 15 months. The company will also run ads in other countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.
Yahoo’s Bartz said earlier that its brand is one of the company’s biggest assets.
“In the past few years, we have not been as open in showing the world what the Yahoo brand stands for. We are going to change that,” she said on the company’s official blog in February.
While the Sunnyvale, Calif., company still has one of the largest audiences on the Internet — with 158 million unique U.S. users in August, up 12% from the previous year, according to comScore Inc. — it has lost advertising share to competitors such as Google Inc. in the last few years.
“I think what occurred with Yahoo is that people just decided to put a cloud over its head,” said Bartz. “Now, it is like, if we are attempting to remove the cloud, then there has to be something shiny and different. [But] Yahoo has a fantastic company, a billion dollars a year free cash flow, 600 million users around the world. When you get out of New York City and Silicon Valley, everybody loves Yahoo.”
Yahoo’s latest announcement is that it intends to attract with a mix of personalized and general content that is simple to use on the web, cellphone, and television, and sell them to advertisers. But there are a few legitimately new developments over at the big Y.
The branding campaign emerged following Yahoo’s revitalization of its homepage, Search, Mail, Messenger, and mobile products. The revamped Yahoo Search aims to make search more personally relevant through better search result categorization, page design improvements, SearchPad annotation, and query assistance.
Tapan Bhat, Yahoo’s senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences, said the latest ad initiative is more than a marketing strategy and also “is about Yahoo’s positioning.” One of the new ads reads: “The Internet is under new management. Yours.”