New Yahoo ad campaign: dumb and dumber

What is it about high-profile companies creating really dumb marketing campaigns? Now Yahoo has gotten in on the game, with their "purple" concept (site found by way of Webbalert.com and Techcrunch). It's part urban game (e.g., people with bikes are traveling around multiple cities with a GPS and a camera taking pictures that post automatically to Flickr.com) part viral marketing, part video series. A comedian pulls some purple pranks, people sing in an elevator. In case you didn't know, purple is supposed to be the "fun" color and is all part of the Yahoo branding effort.



The main ad that plays is just laughably bad, not for any particular reason than it just shows people wearing purple, standing around or trying to have fun when they are not sure why. Because your Yahoo Mail is jam-packed with entertaining spam? Because the company can only create interesting products by assimilating other companies? Because you love exclamation marks in corporate logos?



I think the best ads tell a story about the product, and in that sense, neither the Microsoft ad nor the Yahoo marketing campaign really hit that mark. One of the best ads in recent memory is this Honda ad which is an actual choreographed event that is just unbelievably cool. But it also has a point: a Honda car is more precisely engineered than, say, a Ford Taurus from 1999 or a Yahoo Web 2.0 portal.



How can Yahoo re-establish their brand? Not by convincing people that the color purple is fun. Give us the Honda ad of the Web - take us inside your lab somehow, flaunt your innovation, profile a designer or developer who, let's say, is making really cool products at your company and happens to be 16 years old. Figure out how to tie your ad campaign to the idea of making amazing Web 2.0 products for the next-gen crowd.



What's my main reaction to the purple ads? For one, it reminds me that I'm on a business trip and running low on clothes, and that I hate anything purple. It reminds me, vaguely, of that one Oprah Winfrey movie. It reinforces the idea that Yahoo doesn't make great product, they just like to flaunt brand and image. And, it makes me immediately forget all about the purple site.

From : http://blogs.computerworld.com/yahoo_purple_ad

Yahoo to let users opt out of ad tracking

Yahoo to implement ad-tracker opt out

Facing privacy pressure from Congress, Yahoo Inc. said Friday that it will institute a system to let consumers opt out of ads on its site that target their Web browsing behavior.

Behavioral targeting is a technology that seeks to deduce consumers' interests by tracking what sorts of Web sites they visit.

The change, which will take effect in a few weeks, was announced in response to a hearing held last month by the Internet subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has looked into behavioral targeting and other online advertising practices.

Previously, Yahoo had offered the opt-out choice on ads that it runs on other sites. With Friday's announcement, the company pledged to extend that option to ads displayed on its own pages. "Yahoo understands that the trust of our users is our greatest asset," Anne Toth, the company's vice president for policy, said in a statement.

Yahoo said consumers will be able to access the opt-out feature by visiting its privacy center, which is linked on the home page and nearly every page on its network. Those who do opt out of targeted ads will instead see generic ads.

The Associated Press reported that the policy change does not affect Yahoo's other targeted ads, such as those tied to search terms or location, nor stop the collection of the data that had been used to target ads. Yahoo said it still needs such information for such uses as fraud detection.

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Microsoft Corp. also allow users to opt out of targeted ads on their sites, while Google Inc. generally does not use the sort of targeting that had aroused congressional interest.

For more details about the initiative, or to read Yahoo's response to Congress, go to links.sfgate.com/ZEMA.

Plane folds its wings and drives off

The not-yet-air-tested Terrafugia Transition is designed to fold its wings and be driven down the highway in bad weather.

Sausalito native Carl Dietrich visited Google headquarters Friday to show off the prototype for a light sport aircraft that can fold its wings after landing and then drive off, like a car, at highway speeds.

Dietrich, 31, an MIT-trained aerospace engineer, has named this road-ready plane the Terrafugia Transition. In a telephone interview, he said he expects to sell it for about $195,000, assuming it passes its flying tests. He said the prototype displayed at Google has an engine and should be flight-worthy, but won't take to the air until the end of the year.

Assuming the Transition flies true, it would join a new category of two-seat, light sport aircraft that can be piloted by anyone with a valid state driver license and 20 hours of flight training.

Like the ICON A5 aircraft, designed by two Stanford business school graduates, the Transition can fold up, be loaded onto a trailer and towed like a boat.

But Dietrich said the Transition does the ICON A5 one better, because once it folds its wings it will also be capable of being driven down the road at highway speeds.

Why make the plane drivable? Dietrich said two of the leading causes of small plane accidents are running out of gas, often due to flying around bad weather, or crashes caused by bad weather. He said pilots who encounter bad weather will be able to land the Transition at any one of approximately 5,000 small airfields scattered across the United States and continue the trip, more safely, on the ground.

From : http://www.sfgate.com

Why Yahoo sports is a better partner for Turner than AOL

The decision by Time Warner's Turner cable network to partner with Yahoo for a multi-year ad sales and content deal for sports prompts one obvious question: Why would Turner choose Yahoo as its first sports partner when it already has another major portal, AOL, in the Time Warner portfolio? The answer is simple: scale.

Although AOL has the sixth-most-trafficked sports site, with an average monthly unique audience of 9.2 million visitors, according to ComScore, Yahoo Sports gets more than twice that, with 20.6 million. That's enough to make it the top-ranked sports site in monthly traffic, just ahead of ESPN.com, which averaged 20.4 million visitors in the last 12 months. So suddenly Turner, which will exclusively sell all advertising for Yahoo's National Basketball Association, golf and Nascar pages, has become one of the biggest players in online sports content.

Broader reach

David Levy, president of Turner Broadcasting Sales and Turner Sports, said the audience for Yahoo's NBA, Nascar and golf pages is roughly 80 per cent unduplicated once Turner's unique users are factored in. "What this really does is allows us to extend our reach to an even broader audience, and enables us to leverage our marketing messages by leveraging each of the companies' national audiences. So you're not only getting NBA.com, you're getting Yahoo NBA," he said.

Todd Teresi, senior VP of Yahoo's Publisher Channel, added in a statement, "This announcement builds on our strategy to be both the starting point for consumers seeking the premier sports content, and to be the choice for leading Internet publishers looking to maximize their revenue potential."

The Yahoo partnership is not exclusive, so there's still potential for a similar deal with AOL, or any other major portal, down the road. "We can do AOL with the right model and the right financial terms put into place," Mr. Levy said.

Turner has also recently formed its own vertical ad network, which pools 19 sites in the Turner stable, including CNN.com, CartoonNetwork.com and TNT.tv, making the Yahoo pact a horizontal and vertical sell for advertisers. Mr. Levy said he now has the ability to use Yahoo's database to create behavioral profiles and effectively target users. "So if a user conducts a search for golf clubs through Yahoo search and then goes to Yahoo Mail, we're able to run an ad for Callaway clubs, for example. If they come to any of these sites through the Yahoo portfolio and stay within Yahoo's domain, we can track them and their behavioral domain."

Aiming better at targets

Such behavioral characteristics have become more appealing to digital buyers, several of whom extolled the virtues of Yahoo's offerings in a recent Ad Age roundtable on ad networks. "Yahoo has a lot more personal information through its other services for which you registered. So they can cross-target with demographic information ... and because Google doesn't have similar information, Yahoo actually has better proprietary data at this point in time," said Augustine Fou, senior VP-digital strategy at MRM Worldwide, New York.

Added Chris Kilkes, interactive media manager at Godfrey Q & Partners, San Francisco, "We've seen that Yahoo's registration offering leads to much more engaged audiences versus what we have seen through, say, a Google gadget. That leads us to believe that combining registration data with behavioral is just narrowing the funnel a lot more efficiently for us."

Source: http://www.exchange4media.com/