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Yahoo announces plans for new global ad campaign

Internet search titan Yahoo announced plans yesterday to trumpet its revamped search page and enhanced features in a global advertising campaign complete with trademark company yodel.

"We are bringing back that Yahoo spirit uniquely in an updated, celebratory way," Allen Olivo, company vice president of worldwide marketing said. "Hearing that yodel again, I think, will make people very happy."

Olivo was referring to the yodeling of the Santa Clara, California, search engine's name that has long served as an audible exclamation mark for its advertising.

Yahoo ads would be online, in theaters, played on radio stations and shown on television beginning on Thursday in what Olivo described as "by far the biggest roll-out in recent time."

Newspapers and magazines would be skipped, according to the ad plan. Aspects of the campaign were to be played out in 14 countries.

"It is a way of saying `Yahoo!' again and having fun," Olivo said. "Yahoo is an interactive marketer and from time to time we like to use mass media as punctuation."

New Yahoo ads offered humorous depictions of parallel lives; one in which the protagonist used Yahoo and the other in which they did not.

In one, the fate of a school boy being hounded by a bully is dictated by whether he got an e-mail warning from a classmate, a preview showed.

In another, a barbecue host is transformed from blundering to brilliant by being in the know regarding the woes faced by his friends.

"We are creating dual worlds of life with Yahoo and life without Yahoo," Olivo said. "Showing, in a quirky way, the benefits of using Yahoo."

He added there was "some irreverent" ad content along the lines of "My boyfriend stays up all night playing with his Yahoo" and "My husband's Yahoo hasn't looked this good in years."

Yahoo unveiled a transformed main Web page earlier this year in a shift to focus on online social networking services for its more than 500 million users worldwide.

For example, "Yahoo Answers" lets users pose questions to the search engine's community and a "Pulse" feature provides updates regarding trends or stories getting the most online attention.

"The bigger picture here is we have more than half a billion people a month who use Yahoo," Olivo said. "That is about half the Internet users in the world. We'd like the other half to come in and use Yahoo as well."

Yahoo declined to reveal how much money it would spend on the campaign and claimed the push was not driven by the intense competition between Internet search engines for devotees whose visits translate into advertising revenue.

"This campaign is not a response to any other competitor or market factor; I can't emphasis that more strongly," Olivo said.

"This is about getting people to come and see the great things we have," he said.
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