It’s You

Yahoo! CMO Elisa Steele unveils new global marketing campaign

Yahoo! chief marketing officer Elisa Steele announced our largest branding campaign ever in an IAB Mixx keynote address, telling the Ad Week audience that our message to consumers is: It’s you.

“We’d like to provide consumers more of what they want, and less of what they don’t,” Elisa said. That means bring them the best of their worlds (their friends, families and interests) and the world (news, information, and entertainment).

Elisa pointed to recent launches of our front page, Mail, and mobile apps are good examples of how we’re bringing both together. “Everything needs to be grounded on this concept of personal relevance.”

In the keynote, Elisa unveiled a video and still images that will be part of a global campaign. “The Internet is under new management: Yours,” one ad said. She also played new versions of the Yahoo! yodel.

Keynote Highlights

• Introducing new research into consumer perception of different types of advertising media – including print, broadcast TV, and Web – Elisa noted that, when it comes to the Internet, there’s a huge “expectation gap” between what people want from advertising and what they get.
• Consumers not only want ads to be relevant, but they also want to be ad content to be informative, be easy to find, store and find again. (In fact, 77 percent of respondents said they wanted to be able to find an ad again but didn’t know how.)
• While consumers are getting more of what they want out of the Web, they are not getting what they want from advertising on the web. As a result, ad dollars lag. This gap, Elisa noted, is where Yahoo! comes in.
• The intersection of “my world” and “the world” is where people find what matters to them the most, and that’s where Yahoo! will be, for both consumers and advertisers.
• Elisa cited four big to-do’s for Yahoo! and for advertisers: 1) Provide actionable insights for consumers down to the individual level. 2)  Continue to create innovative products to “bridge the emotional divide.” 3) Solidify metrics for performance marketers. 4) Push for industry standards and ways for all of us to work together.
• The shift is away from demographics to interests. “Whether you’re 15 years old or 50, it’s about shared interests…”
• Yahoo! will stay focused on individual relevance combined with massive scale. Bringing those two together is “what gives us the opportunity and the calling card to compete for your business and earn your business…”
• Yahoo! SVP Tapan Bhat said, “In the past, the site was the dominant paradigm on the Web. Now you, the user, are the dominant organizing paradigm on the Web.”
• One key to realizing that paradigm, Tapan said, is making search and integrated “discovery experience” that follows the user and by providing integrated experiences across the Web that appeal to shared interests among users.
• The new “It’s You” campaign will roll out to 10 countries around the world, creating a global/local brand that appeals to “all cultures, all ages and all interests.”
• Yahoo!, said Elisa, will be the “place that will launch a billion yodels…” (And, yes, the yodel will live on, but in many different and more democratic forms.)
• Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz ended the presentation by reinforcing the Yahoo! promise to our more than 500 million monthly visitors and to our advertisers, pledging to make Yahoo! easier to work with, smarter, more insightful, and better targeted. “The you,” said Carol, “is also you,” the advertiser.

For more about the branding campaign, see Elisa’s post on Yodel Ancecdotal. Or to see Elisa for yourself, check out the keynote and the presentation—including a sneak peak at the new video ad.

— The Team