• by April 4, 2004

Yahoo!, a brand born on the Internet, shows its grown-up side in a comprehensive new brand campaign that breaks on Thursday with four 30-second TV spots positioning the Web powerhouse as a life engine that enables people to get more out of their lives.

The initial four spots will run primarily on cable channels, including Discovery's TLC, The Travel Channel, Bravo, FoodTV, Viacom's VH1, and Comedy Central; some network television is also planned. The effort also includes online rich media and banner advertising throughout the Yahoo! network, and a special micro-site where consumers can engage with the subjects of the TV commercials and interact with highlighted services.

The estimated $100 million campaign was created by Soho Square, New York, a WPP Group unit formed especially to handle the Yahoo! account, which draws heavily on the resources of siblings mOne and MindShare, as well as the San Francisco-based creative team of Silver-Melville. Print and radio will be rolled out incrementally, as well as off-network online media buys. A billboard in New York City's Times Square has gone up; outdoor in other New York City positions, San Francisco, and Los Angeles will eventually debut. The brand positioning will extend globally, but the campaign debuts in the United States first; the creative approach must be adapted to fit specific global markets, according to Yahoo!. The campaign timing for those markets--and the budget--are not known.

The campaign represents the culmination of a nine-month process of research, development, and testing, and represents the first initiative undertaken by Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo!'s chief marketing officer, who joined the company last July. Dunaway, a former Frito-Lay marketing executive, was hired to take on the task of building on Yahoo!'s unique brand equities (its quirkiness, the iconic yodel, and friendly community), while also crystallizing its loose collection of properties into a compelling position that will help move the company into adulthood. "The most challenging thing is that sometimes it's much easier to turn a poor brand around than it is to move a strong brand to a more relevant place," Dunaway says, commenting on her task.

"The brand has a lot of equity, but you're constantly re-earning the loyalty of your consumers," Dunaway says. "Yahoo! has entered new businesses, consumers are spending more time with us, and the whole market and environment has really changed. We felt it was time to evolve the position that would retain the great fun of Yahoo!, but would add some stature and some substance to the brand, and would more directly address the way Yahoo! helps our users get more value from their lives," she explains.

Yahoo!'s new tagline seeks to position the Internet brand as more than a place to find things: "Yahoo! is the life engine." The word "engine," in this case, is meant to convey a feeling of empowerment and the idea that Yahoo! offers everything a person needs to accomplish things in their personal and professional lives. Yahoo! also wanted "engine" to call out an association with high performance, quality, and innovation.

Yahoo!'s last brand campaign in February 2002 positioned it primarily as a destination for finding things quickly and easily on the Internet. "But we're also great at helping people connect with one another and for exploring and really engaging in all kinds of passions," Dunaway emphasizes. "The goals of the [new] campaign really showcase various properties."

Those properties include shopping, personals, search, music, jobs, email, fantasy sports, and instant messaging. The campaign's creative approach taps real people who use Yahoo!, including minor celebrities like former California Gov. Gray Davis. They each talk about how they use various Yahoo! services. In all, 26 different people were shot; Yahoo!'s trademark yodel remains part of the brand.

One of the initial four spots debuting this week features Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, juxtaposed with Charlie 2una, a member of the hip-hop group Jurassic 5, talking about how they use Launch, Yahoo!'s online music service. The dual-pane spot shows Hart talking about how he uses Launch to search for old music and 2una referring to Launch as a kind of music encyclopedia that helps him keep up on the latest releases. The spot closes with a voice-over describing Yahoo! as a "Search engine, music engine, life engine" and ends with the Yahoo! yodel.

The yodel "actually served as a really good North Star," Dunaway says, referring to the campaign development process. "We knew that if we could put the yodel on the back of the spots, that was [a] sign that we had retained the core heritage of the brand," she explains, adding: "It's like leaving with a smile."

Another spot juxtaposes a chef and a fire-eater. The chef uses Yahoo! to search for and purchase the hottest hot chilies, while the fire-eater has searched for fire-eating equipment--and to her surprise found an entire variety of torches. Yahoo! let the people in the commercials tell their stories, unscripted: "We kept hearing amazing stories that you just couldn't make up, so we let users tell their stories in their own words," Dunaway says.

Perhaps the most charming of the initial group is a spot featuring former California Gov. Gray Davis paired with a junior high school student who uses Yahoo! mail to convince her schoolmates to elect her as eighth-grade treasurer. With "Hail to the Chief" playing in the background, Davis introduces himself and says he's using Yahoo! to look for an agent, suggesting that if a former actor can be governor, maybe a "former governor can be an actor," although he doesn't think "action/adventure" would be his genre. The spot closes with Yahoo! as a "Job engine, mail engine, life engine." The creative strategy presents the audience with two different demographics, each using Yahoo! to achieve a task or to enrich a passion.

The campaign's micro-site will feature additional Yahoo! properties and people who use them, such as a fantasy sports player, a job recruiter, and a deaf woman who uses Yahoo! email and instant messaging to interact with hearing friends. The micro-site is designed to promote sampling of Yahoo! properties, including its for-pay services, via interaction with the people who appear in the commercials. For example, a search box will appear for consumers who want to find out what Charlie 2una's favorite tracks are on Yahoo!'s Launch. "We want to use the micro-site to drive deeper engagement, and expose people who are on Yahoo! but maybe use [only] two or three properties to additional properties," Dunaway says.

Yahoo! plans to make online media buys outside of its network, although it declined to name the properties: "It's very important for us to be leaders in the space and to show advertisers to really use this medium to its full potential," Dunaway notes.