• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 6, 2010

Yahoo posted a sneak peek of several creative pieces that will become part of the next phase of the company's "It's You!" marketing campaign. This second phase begins May 18, and will run through the year. The ads will appear online, on billboards, airplanes, television and radio. While the campaign aims to highlight Yahoo's products and services and what they mean to consumers, a video on Yahoo's site sets the tone.

That tone takes a blatant jab at Google. The video begins with the narrator explaining "There's a theory about homepages. They should get you where you want to go. You don't stop or linger. There's nothing to look at but a box and a button."

The video implies that Google's cold blank homepage isn't inviting, and as soon as you arrive it hustles you out the door. The narrator says when you look at this homepage nothing looks back at you. Yahoo's homepage, on the other hand, becomes the center of your online life by getting to know you. It contains the news and sports you want to read about, as well as items you're searching for on eBay and connections to friends on Facebook and Twitter. It's a network, homepage, search engine, as well as everything you're into.

Still, analysts and industry insiders remain skeptical that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz can turn Yahoo around. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, vice president of marketing at Webtrends, and former Yahoo employee, says companies that go on the offensive from a marketing rather than a product perspective signal that they're in trouble. It would be interesting to know if the creative minds at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the agency responsible for the ad, see it that way.

Yahoo's challenge isn't about growing the brand, but rather the content and innovations they introduce into their network, says Kaykas-Wolff, who spent three and a half years at Yahoo. "The reality is, they're being beat in two different areas that are massively important," he says. "Those two areas are algorithmic search and semantic search."

Kaykas-Wolff believes Yahoo conceded algorithmic search to Google, and semantic search to Facebook. He called it a "curious time" for Yahoo because the company's challenge isn't just to stop the decline of the business -- but find ways to grow it. It you start going on the attack from a marketing perspective you start grasping at straws, he says.

Google's search share rose about 2% to 71.40% of all U.S. searches in April 2010, while the No. 2 search engine, Yahoo, declined about 1% to 14.96%, according to Experian Hitwise. Bing and Ask received 9.43% and 2.18%, respectively. The remaining 78 search engines measured accounted for 2.03% of U.S. searches.

Advertisers would likely agree with Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster, who believes Yahoo's strength remains in display ads, rather than search. "While the focus of investors around Yahoo's last earnings report mainly centered around the impact of Microsoft beginning to make payments to Yahoo in accordance with the search transition, we believe the most important part of Yahoo's business is the display segment," he wrote in a research note published Wednesday. "Display grew 20% year on year in Q1, ahead of our 12% estimate."

It's unclear whether the Sunnyvale, Calif., company can pull off a turnaround, though most folks hope for the best. It's also not clear if Yahoo's campaign will have or has had any impact.