Yahoo's New Ad Pitch: “It's You!”
By Suzanne Vranica and Jessica E. Vascellaro — Yahoo is planning to Tuesday reintroduce its battered brand to the public on Tuesday with a massive global marketing campaign, according to people familiar with the effort.
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo heads into late September 2009 with its core product outsourced: the confirmed August deal sends its search technology to Microsoft, a move that knocked shares down 12% and left the company needing a new answer to "what is Yahoo?" The planned "It's You!" campaign — reported by people familiar with the effort but not yet publicly confirmed by Yahoo — is that answer, repositioning the portal as personalized media rather than a search destination.
The positioning extends an arc Yahoo started years ago: its 2005 overhaul of search advertising [[a:1176156]] and the 2007 SmartAds push to meld brand and direct-response targeting both bet on knowing the individual user. With queries now running on Microsoft's backend, the user profile is the asset Yahoo has left to advertise.
First-order effects
- Yahoo's sales force shifts its advertiser pitch from search relevance to audience and personalization, since query traffic now runs on Microsoft technology under the confirmed partnership.
- If the campaign launches Tuesday as reported, Yahoo commits major marketing spend to defending its brand at the moment investors have priced in search decline — the rumored revenue-per-search exit clause hangs over whether that spend pays off.
Second-order effects
- Every incremental visitor the campaign wins feeds usage into the Microsoft-powered search backend, so Bing captures part of the return on Yahoo's brand dollars unless Yahoo exercises its rumored right to terminate over weak revenue-per-search versus Google.
- Rivals such as AOL and Google come under pressure to answer with consumer-brand campaigns of their own, as differentiation shifts from algorithms to audience relationships.
Third-order effects
- With search infrastructure consolidated among fewer engines, consumer web companies converge on personalization and user data as the brand axis — the "It's You" framing generalizes the SmartAds premise into an industry-wide template.
- The more ad value rests on identity-based targeting rather than query intent, the more platform practices around user likeness and data draw regulatory and public scrutiny.
The trend: As search technology consolidates behind a handful of engines, consumer web brands like Yahoo compete on personalization and audience data rather than search capability.