"We can't ignore the fact that starting next year, half of the U.S. population will be over 45 years of age; that's never happened before," says John Starkey, marketing director for General Mills. "People are living longer, they are redefining and reinventing that part of their lives, and we want to be there to help them achieve that."

This partnership provides an opportunity for General Mills to engage at a deeper level with this targeted audience, Starkey tells MediaPost.

"Yahoo brings their expertise as a premiere Web resource and has a high index with our target audience," Starkey says. "We're excited to partner with Yahoo to reach boomers in an engaging way."

The program header will include navigation so users can access other Vitality experiences, like games and news. General Mills will flight product media within the experiences over the course of the campaign. Currently, an ad for Fiber One cereal is featured. General Mills will be measuring the effectiveness of the campaign through Yahoo's Consumer Direct program, which allows retailers to track offline sales spurred by online ad campaigns.

The Yahoo Games and Yahoo News properties will feature "Vitality-themed" content for Boomers. It will be focused on healthy living for Boomers. The News experience page will be a custom Vitality section. When users click to read an article, they will stay within the experience.

The Games experience pages will be in an area of the Yahoo Games called Yahoo Brain Games, and will feature three to five games such as Sudoku, Crossword Puzzles and Mahjong solitaire. The Brain Games promotional position on the front page of Games will point users into the Vitality Brain Games for the entire campaign.

The campaign, which launched in September, will run through May. "This is another good example of how advertisers are turning to Yahoo for more than a typical search or display ad buy," says a Yahoo spokesperson. Yahoo created a similar campaign for Bank of America in June.

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