Yahoo Unveils Rebranding Campaign

Elisa Steele of Yahoo

As expected, Yahoo Tuesday formally unveiled its new global brand campaign centered on the theme of catering to all aspects of consumers' online lives and carrying the tag line "It's You."

The ambitious marketing effort, announced at IAB Mixx Conference and Expo and aimed at breathing new life into the Web portal's image, will launch in the U.S. on Sept. 28 and in the U.K. and India on Oct. 5 before rolling out to other countries in 2010 including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

"We want to celebrate the (Yahoo) brand once again in the marketplace," Elisa Steele, Yahoo's executive vice president and chief marketing officer, told a packed room at the IAB conference in introducing the company's new ad campaign tabbed at more than $100 million and expected to run through next year.

While admitting the slogan is "pretty simple," Steele emphasized that it reinforces Yahoo's focus on personalization and helping users to easily navigate all the services needs online, from accessing news and information to connecting with friends to entertainment.

Anticipation surrounding the new campaign began brewing when word of the rebranding campaign began leaking out this summer on the All Things D blog and after Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz revealed the company's plans to investors in July. The Wall Street Journal had first reported the company's new tag line, on Monday.

But during today's presentation, Steele provided the first glimpse of creative to be used in the campaign across the Web, television and other media through a short video clip. It showed a montage of images of people worldwide, from children playing soccer to a man painting with light a la Picasso to scenes of nightclub dancing.

A voiceover suggests that people can use Yahoo to do things like "buzz," "flirt," 'watch' and "wonder" and repeats the new "It's You" tag line at the end of the clip. Echoing that theme, Steele also previewed some of the new display ad creative, featuring lines like "The Internet is under new management, yours," "This time it's personal," and "Totally, you."

The half-dozen or so ads shown were each accompanied by photos reflecting a diverse cross-section of Yahoo users from a goateed young hipster to an Asian mother and daughter to an African-American skateboarder. Steele pointed out that that photos were taken of people on New York City streets and that Yahoo would localize that approach by featuring photos of actual users in campaigns in other countries.

Where does all that leave Yahoo's famous yodel sound effect, first introduced in a quirky 2003 television commercial? While admitting the yodel had become a "a bit dusty" over the years, Steele said that rather than scrapping the trademark sound, Yahoo was "democratizing" it by introducing new versions intoned by users.

An audio sampling served up at the conference included a yodel sung by children, a Gregorian chant-style version, and another with a rock & roll twist, among others. The new yodels will cap off broadcast spots starting next week as well.

The branding overhaul follows other more substantive upgrades to Yahoo.com, including a relaunched home page offering users enhanced customization features as well as the new search partnership with Microsoft focused on Bing.

Yahoo Tuesday also unveiled a revamped search page that mirrors the redesigned home page by incorporating its menu of customizable Web applications on the left side to serve essentially as additional search filters beyond the familiar search engine box. The new offering also relies on Yahoo's Search Monkey technology that adds more data such as photos and videos to search results.

Yahoo last month also announced a series of updates today for its mail, messenger and mobile platforms.

During the presentation Tuesday, Yahoo Senior Vice President Tapan Bhat also highlighted new services the company has in the works, including the ability to click in-text links from third-party sites to retrieve relevant information or social connections from a user's Yahoo apps. He also suggested users will also eventually be able to send messages and photos instantly via TV.

Bartz closed the Yahoo presentation with a promise to deliver better insights, more knowledge and a "more modern" Yahoo to advertisers. "Yahoo is an asset to users and we want to be to all of you," she told the assembled marketers, agency executives and technology providers.

For their part, investors didn't seem impressed, as Yahoo's stock was trading down slightly Tuesday afternoon at just under $17 a share.

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