Yahoo unveiled a new branding campaign at a press conference in New York City, centered around personalization and connecting directly with consumers. The Web company’s new tagline is, “It’s Y!ou” (with the awkward Yahoo exclamation point in there). Yahoo wants to make the Web personal and it is emphasizing the various ways it does that through the Yahoo home page, search, and individual properties. The company will be spending “more than $100 million” on this new branding campaign, CEO Carol Bartz reveals.
Yahoo is so big that the only way it can speak directly to individuals is to make the message more about them than about Yahoo. Other slogans in the new campaign include “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.” Just sticking the word “you” in an ad doesn’t make it any less generic, but Yahoo hopes to follow up on this promise by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user. This extends to search, which rolled out a number of new features more broadly which were previously being tested (including SearchAssist, and enhanced results from SearchMonkey).
“The focus of the company is to really engage and personalize Yahoo for the users,” says Bartz. “Yahoo is a really unique company. It is the only brand that can make the promise of uniting my world and your world. We do deliver information about the world and we do deliver information relevant to you.”
Always folksy, Bartz compares the Internet to “scrambled eggs” which Yahoo can help unscramble for consumers. She also talked a bit about Yahoo’s positioning and getting rid of businesses not core to this consumer focus. Asked whether she is trying to sell Zimbra and other non-consumer businesses, she wouldn’t comment specifically, but did say generally, “We have to make sure we are ready to put our signature at the bottom of every page that has Yahoo on it.”
In terms of what she is seeing in the advertising market, Bartz wouldn’t go so far as to predict a recovery in ad spending, but reiterated that spending seems to be “bumping along the bottom.” She also clarified that recent reports about her selling stock are wrong: “I have not sold one share of Yahoo stock.” There was a sale related to a restricted stock grant, but Yahoo sells them to pay off the taxes as a matter of course.
Finally, when asked if the press was hard on Yahoo and obsessed with seeing change, Bartz agreed wholeheartedly. She told the room of New York journalists and bloggers:
“When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys?. Go be cynical about frickin’ Google. You got me pissed off.”
Carol, don’t ever change.
Yahoo blows
I think Yahoo has market in addressing the needs of people who want “to be a little bit social”. Meaning users that don’t have or rarely use Facebook. I have a Yahoo account and I like the direction they’re heading simplifying things although still a bit buggy.
Seriously, give it up already. There is just no way to compete with the likes of Google, Gmail, and Facebook.
Yes, because Gmail is competing with Google…
I just dnt agree with you .. Yahoo has got more market than Microsoft .. For now Google is out of reach of Yahoo and Microsoft.. Yahoo is very old in the market . and the services which Yahoo is providing are really very good .. at this point I m not comparing it to any other website . have u ever heard .. yahoo mail is not working .. or another problem with it .. as far as remember I have not heard of it .. and we get toknow in every few days that gmail has this problem .. google has that problem .. and so soon .. Yahoo is good .. in its own way ..
Best,
Daina
lol I don’t really care because I’m in one of the ads….so I’m excited. Who cares about that stuff.
Yahoo was first at alot of key points in the internet evolution, but they gave up being a technology company when they signed Google. They need to innovate not just be a media brand.
Yup,
Creating content is not defensible. Instead of producing magazines you want to be Starbucks. Create an ideal environment for reading a magazine, having a meeting, or starting a business. For that you need technology. Integration across products has to be seamless.
Went by the 100 million dollar 5 year old Yahoo Building at the Burbank Airport today and the place looks vacant. sad thing for such a young bldg. so much talent and opportunities in the area you’d think they’d be able to innovate or execute something from the strategic location. This Y!ou campaign makes no sense. 100 million to promote “Y!ou”? what a waste of time, money and energy. they’d be better off spending that money on acquisitions. I wanna know who’s responsible for this campaign? i want them in my office first thing in the morning.
i agree with carol to a point that people from the valley are naive, complacent and bias.
complacent-adj: pleased, esp. with oneself or one’s merits, advantages, situation, etc., often without awareness of some potential danger or defect.
I liked when Yahoo started web developer section where he gives tips for web sites and provide software/tool for us.
look at that collection of third-stringers in that picture. classic yahoo…rejects from parts unknown, on a mission to excel at mediocrity.
behind carol’s blather there isn’t much to report. she’s cutting a lot but not building anything. and now that google is marching farther into display ads, her core competency will get further gutted
no carol, we don’t want to buy zimbra, you’ve already demonstrated it is worthless. same with hotjobs. same with…yahoo
This is so cheesy. It looks like a bunch of well-meaning earnest middleschool computer-club geeks decided to get “creative” with clip art.
Vote for Pedro!
lol. this comment ftw. this and the comment above yours with zimbra and hotjobs, and maybe someone else’s comment below about her scrambled eggs language (campsteve’s comment i think).
Carol should put those scrambled eggs in a big truck and then unscramble them using a series of tubes. This picture looks like an episode of ‘The View’ or should I say the ‘The vY!ou”
hahaha.
since yahoo has all these Y!(insert yahoo page here), maybe they should think about lettin members create their own pages/spaces like how you can do that with msn, and instead of it being Y!ou, it should be Y!You. that’s how dumb yahoo seems to be.
For me, if it was really about “You” then there would be no exercise with the exclamation mark.
All that tells me is that Yahoo is still in control… they can’t make the bold branding step of making it truely ours.
Makes me more worried about them than me. I have free choice, and this pushes me away from them. There’s plenty of similar services doing the same thing, but better! No thanks, I choose freedom!
main screen turn on… its you
Oh so now you can “connect” with people just by adding a few taglines? Are they even serious?
do they not look serious in that picture with all those nice wears and crossed legs. the dude in the tie, with that facial expression and that stance is the best out of all of them.
I love starting my day at Yahoo and using it as my personal PERSONAL e-mail for the last 10 years. I keep my homepage and e-mail on the classic view.
I love the access of news and Yahoo writers.
Why do they feel the need to change into something else when they got it right over 10 years ago.
Stop searching for the magic unicorn.
yeah i kept mine classic too. couldn’t handle all the new things they were doing. if they’re doing something they should atleast have it like how google labs does so i can pic my own features.
have used yahoo email since 96 or 97 and they keep making changes.. some good , other just terrible..ticks me off when they make something ‘better’ by giving US MORE clicks to get somewhere.. like the new address book page..how dumb can they get.?
i stayed with yahoo mail BECAUSE it is simple..clean and NOT like gmail..
not everyone wants to connect with tons of people and not everyone cares about previewing email or ‘connections’ and who did what after you emailed them.. live it simple for those of us liking simple fast use of it
“When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guy?. Go be cynical about frickin’ Google. You got me pissed off.”
You should be pissed off because you are utterly wrong. I’m far, far away from NY or Silicon Valley, even from the US, and I still don’t like Yahoo!. I don’t have anything with Yahoo! itself, it’s just that everything they do is mediocre. Anything and everything they do, someone else does it better. At first there was Yahoo! Search, then came Google. At first there was Yahoo! Mail — then came Gmail. At first there was Yahoo! Messenger and then came GTalk. At first there was Geocities, then came Google Pages (and Sites). Yahoo! Music? Last.fm! You get the point.
at first there was Google Answers, then there is Yahoo! answers. at first there was Google Froogle, then there was Yahoo! Shopping. at first there was Google Picasa, then there was Flickr. at first there was Google Finance, then there was Yahoo! Finance. at first there was iGoogle, then there is My Yahoo.
let me take a break.
.. at first there was Google Pages… wait. it’s not dead yet?
yahoo answers is horrible..
too hard to go back and find something you read before on a search and some folks ‘answer’ with junk so far from ‘right’– if you want to know something you are better off asking a stranger in person lol
but i do love yahoo news.. but they keep changing that too…
KISS keep it simple stupid
Hate to break it to you, but most of those Yahoo! services you mentioned precede the Google equivalents by a huge margin. Which ones are better is another story, but please at least get the facts right.
i used to love Y!live or y!music whatever they call it now. but now there’s youtube. now bands are getting their own websites where i can still stream music, and there are companies out there who do iti better than yahoo, even when yahoo was doing it before a lot of companies. their podcasts, radio streams were one of the reasons i liked going to y!live, i could pick what i like and rate things, add clips from albums and create playlists…it was basically real player online, but i gave it all up. i wonder if it’s gotten better.
How about getting customers back by maybe fixing the email?
The new yahoo website is a perfect example of how to make a bad website, worse.
what did they do??????? they made the old homepage worse? i thought they were trying to clean it up and make it better.
I don’t know why but the downward spiral began around the time the massive script-load was added to the homepage and email login. MRO recommends KSS.
hmm…this slogan won’t make me want to use yahoo more. how about new functionality from yahoo instead of a slogan? 100 mil will be wasted.
Donate $1 million to 100 garage startups in the valley. They might give you a better roi in few years.
Y! makes me sad, that’s $100 million!!
As a Microsoft and Yahoo shareholder this pleases me. I never visit any Yahoo sites myself but the common surfer such as those depicted in the ads may find them appealing.
common surfer here and it’s a very strong NO and an up yours yahoo. well maybe students will fall for this bull.
This campaign will naturally lead to their renaming: Youhoo!
this is exactly how i was pronouncing Y!ou. i added the hoo because i thought it appropriate since yahoo seems to be crazy.
One’s action speaks better than one’s speech. Instead of using the word “You” again and again and spending money on approaching “You” with nice-looking ad-campaigns, why can’t Yahoo! concentrate more on action? Nicely spoken words cannot allure the users for a long time, but good contents can. And, look at their ad-campaign, here also, they are not honest with “You” and have tried to distort “You” by inserting their trade-mark “!” by making it “Y!ou”!!!!!!
Unfortunately for Yahoo!, things are not looking good for it. Its revenue model has almost collapsed. Barring Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Finance, it is not able to beat Google in other fields, especially in Search which is highly remunerative due to context-sensitive ads. Even in mail, Gmail is catching up surely and not that slowly.
In fact, my suggestion to Yahoo! would be something like this. It has huge Internet properties in the form of various Yahoo! services, including Yahoo! Mail. Why can’t it monetize those Internet properties through Google Adsense? Perhaps it may earn more by using Google Adsense instead of using its own defunct ad-services.
Interesting to see how this campaign plays out creatively. But wow, that banner ad… FAIL. Looks like a poor attempt at a Gap print campaign.
yes my mind went straight to gap also…this is the type of ad yahoo makes though. they are the hip tech brand for young people and young business people…and i just think they need to pull their head from their behinds and get a clue. they need to rebrand or redesign or just do something cause this new campaign is just crap.
Yahoo is popular among college kids. Google wins with adults. Microsoft Bing is ok as long as you are under the age of 12.
although i don’t agree with this, based on the ads for all companies this does seem to be true.
“Yahoo is popular among college kids.”
yeah, in 1997
Since subscribing to Yahoo, we moved to Goodyear, AZ. How do I personalize my home page to show weather, local news, etc. for Goodyear?
like how you can do with msn? they don’t have that on yahoo…last i checked aol had something like that. they had it before ms did.
who let corky use the computer???
“It is the only brand that can make the promise of uniting my world and your world. We do deliver information about the world and we do deliver information relevant to you.”
I did a search for “versatile skatepark austin” on both Google and Yahoo?, because that’s information relevant to me. Google displayed what I needed in the first hit, Yahoo? didn’t even display it on the first page.
If there is anything unique about Yahoo?, it’s how delusional they are.
that’s exactly what i found most interesting during the search engine comparisons. bing was eerily like google. yahoo was the most different. it’s not that i’m lazy and i need google to do all the work for me, although i appreciate them making my search experience more efficient, but yahoo sometimes just has the most random search results and not in any kind of heirarchical order. nada. i don’t know. i quite yahoo search a while ago…right when google came. being stuck with yahoo as a primary search engine was horrible. i wonder if they’ve gotten any better.
the weird thing…actually not really because yahoo followers are really loyal (which you can find with all the other tech companies), is that yahoo has a pretty large, vidbrant, dominant community. whenever i’m on google and i type in a question most times the top results are from their yahoo answers section, but i’ve been a member of their Y!A section, and there needs to be a better way to moderate good and bad answers instead of people just gaming the system to get the most yahoo points. who’s going to go to y!a to get credible answers for their questions. it’s good for them that ask jeeves has changed and google answers is no more. something good needs to happen at yahoo. really. it’s going on almost 2 decades now and it’s still crap.
If one is to make an analogy about something scrambled, one should choose something that people want unscrambled. Scrambled eggs are supposed to be scrambled! Good one, Carol.
Reading above comments I realized Yahoo is desperately needing this marketing campaign to be successful because many of the perceptions above about the brand is actually wrong.
okay i have to admit that i used to be a yahoo follower for a long time before i closed my email account last year. the only reason i liked yahoo was mostly because of flickr but aside from that the way their front page was set up (ms and aol have gone this route too) and my email account layout was a complete turnoff. there’s too much happening. the only thing worse than yahoo is aol.
i have to give them kudos on this focus on connectivity, community, individulism (person specific customization)…but this is complete bs. who do they pay to write their plans, their slogans, do these fucking ads that make me want to puke out the big mac i just ate, etc…what the fuck YAHOO? YOU isn’t spelled y!ou like it’s french. it makes no sense. are they buying into this whole text lingo debasing of the english language. i would be all for personalizing the you and keeping the brand trademark but once again this is bs because this y!ou like y!where doesn’t even look interesting. they would have more success trying to make yahoo into a verb and doing an ad campaign to redefine the meaning of yahoo (i know being a yahoo means all kinds of negative things but they could just do what people already do with these terms and make it into a verb or something that is commonly accepted or recognized like when people say igoogle…which can just become i yahoo, or i am Y!). their Y! trademark is much stronger and in my opinion more effective than Y!ou. it’s just wrong.
i guess i will deal with the ad last because i just finished reading the whole thing. DID SHE REALLY SAY THAT???? wow. amazing. that is a great (useless but funny) quote. she wants us to be cynical about google…uhm why when yahoo f’s up more
. and what fucken (well i did convince my uncle in london and my cousin somwhere in africa to get yahoo because it’s more internationally recognizable as an email client in some parts) rock is she sleeping under? outside of sv people love yahoo…what scrambled eggs is she feeding herself? it must be amazing to speak in that yahoo ! way. let’s deal with these slogans that sound and look like shit.
‘“The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.”’
they can’t be real about this. i mean that looks like it took no effort at all. so the commonality is internet and me but then it has to be applicable to all other facets of my life and what i do while i’m online…right…so why couldn’t they have rewritten that in another way.
that ad. change the font. stop with the all caps bold look. stop cutting off limbs. stop with this yahoo only comes in so and so colours. you can keep your purple but change that chartreuse or whatever that yellow orange tan colour is and make it more yellow and less orange/red, and make your magenta/purple pink either more pink or more purple.
and no it’s not m!e. it’s YOU not Y!ou. i don’t know how that ever got past the plannig stages. like this is the best they could come out with out of all the configurations of that trademark? this is complete bull. who are their designers???? who are their project managers???? someone needs to talk to yahoo. i think this big mac is making pissed off but i think it’s more like seeing this crap has just officially ruined my day. who allows things like this to go to the final stages without any self checks. ugh!
CMYK
thanks for the heads up. i had to wiki the colour and i knew it wasn’t really chartreuse but i don’t know the name for golden yellow. i just found out that it’s golden yellow, but i bet if i go to a hardware/paint store there will be some b.s. name for golden yellow. i wish i had a colour wheel or what do they call it, a pantone chart.
One would have expected them to announce a surprise answer to the upcoming GoogleWave.
We offered to help them do this over the summer.
Upstaging GoogleWave would have been a classic, aggressive Silicon Valley thing to do.
Yahoo is so 90’s
The only thing cool about this ad: the girl’s Gladiator sandals. This messaging makes Yahoo! sound soooo desperate! wow
lol with you picking out the gladiator sandals…but that just shows you how desperate they are for young hip people and exactly proves someones “yahoo is so 90’s comment”. trends die out. never stick with a trend.
2 decades almost. what’s yahoo doing to reinvigorate their brand? cause this isn’t it.
Ok about the “you” campaign orientation but a bad copy of the traditional iPod ad cannot and will not attract customers to Yahoo’s web ecosystem.
I’d like to contact carol Bartz.
Bill
Hmm… you cannot unscramble eggs – something to do with thermodynamics… a better analogy would be tangled thread or spaghetti – but scrambled eggs…
If you’re the messaging team for a big brand you should think through your metaphors and analogies better
wordtolb:
subject:carol Bartz, ceo of yahoo
i would never trust women that dress like this to manage anything.
fred buddemeyer
Once again dope.. come back to year 2009. This is not the 1700s. I guess you rather have a bald headed guy with a beer belly run Yahoo… numb nut!
i have longggggggggggggggg been a big yahoo fan. But their new home really really really sucks. I’m annoyed every single time I go to it.
Anytime there is a change, a learning curve is associated with it. It is human nature to resist change. Give it time and you won’t remember what their previous home page was like. As a matter of fact, do you remember any of the previous home page designs?
Ok, on the 1st day of fall they are blowing $100 million.
I’m sure, by Thanks Giving they will blow a few 10s
of millions of dollars (though that time it would be for severance, outplacement and write-offs …).
What a colossal waste of shareholders money …
Bartz is the best thing happened to Yahoo in years. After Bartz, they are pushing out changes much faster than they did before. I still start my day on yahoo mail.
Too many women in that picture, no wonder Yahoo is going down the tubes.
I rather have those women run my company than a numb nut from the 1700s like you. Igor please return to the year 2009.
here we go again .. mbas trying to “innovate” … instead, pay that money to engineers and put them back in charge at yahoo, and create services that actually work and are useful. think why all those email accounts moved to that company on other side of 101 …
Look at all the arm chair QBs with comments about Yahoo all over the place. I guess all of you have built companies bigger and better than Yahoo. Yahoo is still in top 3 in most frequented sites. Unlike YouGarbage (aka YouTube) they did not build up their business on pirated materials and the last time checked they are still getting millions of visitors on their site. Just like politicians in Washington Beltway are clueless and out of touch with reality, same is happening here with Silicone Valley insiders and tech crunch nuts! Give them a chance… what is this big fascination with wanting Yahoo to fail? Once again… please tell me what gigantic internet property have you built?
i’m a yahoo fan and i will wait!