Yahoo! Inc.

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Yahoo! Inc.

DO YOU YAHOO!? CAMPAIGN
LIVE BILLBOARD DATING CAMPAIGN

701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94089
USA
Telephone: (408) 349-3300
Fax: (408) 349-3301
Web site: www.yahoo.com

DO YOU YAHOO!? CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Yahoo!, one of the early stars of the Internet, was launched in 1993 as Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web, offering early users of the Web a way to navigate the quickly expanding Internet—in effect a table of contents. The company's founders soon dropped the name "Jerry's Guide" in favor of something more memorable, Yahoo!, an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. To build the fledgling brand, in April 1996 the company released the "Do You Yahoo!?" marketing campaign.

The $5 million effort included television, radio, and print elements. One of the most memorable of the television spots, which aired in 1997, featured a balding young man using Yahoo! to search for a cure for his thinning hair. The final shot of the spot showed him strutting down the street with a huge, bushy Afro, turning the heads of his fellow pedestrians.

The "Do You Yahoo!?" campaign succeeded in raising the brand recognition of Yahoo! and attracting more visitors to the Web portal. In the late 1990s Yahoo! was far and away the most valuable Internet business, with a market value exceeding $4.3 billion. Yahoo! Stumbled when the Internet sector crashed in the first few years of the new millennium, and its search-engine business was surpassed by a new rival, Google. But Yahoo! was able to rebound and continued to market its portal with the "Do You Yahoo!?" campaign until 2004.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In 1993 Stanford engineering student Dave Filo's personal list of favorite websites had grown beyond 200 "bookmarks." He and fellow engineering student Jerry Yang wrote software that grouped their favorites sites into convenient on-screen folders. When they posted their list on the Web under the title "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," people all over the world contacted them to say thanks. It was the Web's first table of contents.

Filo and Yang then planned to visit and categorize 1,000 websites a day. They decided to avoid the engineer's natural impulse to automate the process, instead throwing tremendous hours of human labor into the project. Yang hated the name "Jerry's Guide," so he and Filo followed the technology community's affinity for acronyms and came up with Yahoo! which stood for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

Yahoo!'s distinguishing founding idea was using a cadre of professional Web surfers to organize a directory of websites into coherent categories. This approach differed from competitors like Excite (then called Architex), which relied on Web-scouring software to view and catalog. According to Fortune magazine, "Yahoo! had the best name, the worst technology, and a quaint belief

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that while other companies' machines were able to survey website addresses by the thousands every second, the human touch could somehow win out."

In 1995 Netscape and America Online both offered to absorb Yahoo! Yang and Filo declined but later signed with Sequoia Capital. Sequoia put up $1 million, which grew to $560 million by the end of 1997. Among the strong competitors that emerged were Excite, developed by another group of Stanford graduate students, and Lycos, which was developed at Carnegie Mellon.

But while human intelligence gave Yahoo! the early lead among Web search engines, what enabled Yahoo! to far outdistance the pack was a rapid rollout of E-mail, financial services, and a strong marketing effort. According to Fortune, in the first quarter of 1996 Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek all delivered roughly the same number of pages. By the end of 1996, however, Yahoo! delivered twice as many pages as second-place Excite. By the third quarter of 1997 Yahoo! visitors looked at 50 million pages a day—more than the other three search engines combined.

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TARGET MARKET

"Do You Yahoo!?" aimed to attract those people who intended to go online, an estimated 18 million people in 1998, according to IntelliQuest. Karen Edwards, Yahoo!'s director of brand management, referred to the company's target market as Internet intenders or near-surfers. This market's demographics skewed toward educated, affluent males, generally in the 25-54 age range. As time went on and women gained more interest in the Internet, the target group broadened to include them, and in the 2000s the ongoing campaign targeted a mass audience, touting Yahoo!'s wide range of services. Moreover, as Yahoo!'s overseas traffic increased, the campaign had to be adopted to different cultures and translated into various languages, although "Do you Yahoo!?" tested much better in English than translated.

In 1997 Yahoo! and other high-tech advertisers were counting on television to expand their markets. In May of that year BusinessWeek reported that 40 percent of U.S. homes had computers, but annual growth was down from the 20-30 percent clip of the past few years to about 13 percent. Yahoo! and others used advertising to show the ease and advantages of going online, in hopes of drawing more and more people into the Internet services market.

COMPETITION

Yahoo!'s strengths against its competition included a huge lead in market capitalization and its reputation as being tops in the search, finance, and news areas. Lycos was more aggressive than Yahoo! in pursuing acquisitions that added new services and broadened its market appeal. Lycos also chose to link separately branded sites to serve different demographic segments. Infoseek and Altavista benefited from the massive shadows of their owners, Disney and Compaq respectively.

Excite had strong health and search features and was the Web page for Dell's PC buyers. In October 1996 Excite introduced a $10 million campaign from Foote Cone & Belding featuring the Jimi Hendrix song "Are You Experienced?" On December 7, 1998, Excite premiered a new network and cable television campaign. Six 30-second commercials showed people botching common activities in embarrassing, humorous ways. One spot told viewers that the woman pictured could send photographs to friends around the world using Excite. She then walked through a screen door she had just closed. In another spot a man was all thumbs as he installed an air conditioner only to watch it plummet from his window. The spots ended with the suggestion that if this person could use Excite "you can too."

By 1998 Yahoo!'s growth and success had moved it into the domain of a new set of competitors. The company was being viewed as a key part of the computing establishment and a great destination for Web users. It felt less like a search engine and more like an online service. The competition grew to include Microsoft and America Online (AOL). Microsoft was spending $61 million on television spots built around its theme "Where do you want to go today?" Trying to outduel Microsoft, AOL spent about $66 million on television advertising. AOL's advantages included billions in monthly Internet user fees and the longest track record as a content aggregator.

In 1998 NBC launched a television campaign for its Web portal company Snap!. The commercials used the tagline "Don't Suffer from Information Overload. Snap! Out of It." A 1996 multimillion dollar campaign from Infoseek appeared regularly in full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal. All told, at one point in the 1990s Yahoo! had to contend with nearly 60 different competitors, yet its chief rival had yet to emerge: Google, the search engine that turned itself into a verb, something Yahoo! had failed to achieve. Yahoo! would be forced to reengineer its search capabilities to compete with Google, but more importantly Yahoo! retooled its business model, so that shopping and entertainment and other ventures overshadowed its search-engine business.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Yang believed that success depended upon giving Web users what they wanted and publicizing the brand voraciously. He recruited Karen Edwards to promote the brand. Edwards, who came from BBDO, where she had worked on the Apple account, wasted little time before putting Yahoo! on television with the $5 million ad campaign.

By 1997 advertising of Internet services had grown dramatically. High-tech products like personal computers, printers, and Internet service providers were becoming commodities. Yahoo! and its competitors offered the same access for the same price. As Edwards observed, "It's just like beer or cars. The products are similar enough that image has a lot to do with why people buy one instead of the other."

INTERESTING YAHOO! FACTS

In 1999 Yahoo! was an $11 billion company that did not own a building
Although a billionaire, company cofounder David Filo put in 100-hour workweeks
Cofounder Jerry Yang was so popular in his parents' home country of Taiwan that he registered in hotels under an assumed name
Yahoo!'s grassroots marketing included a "Yahoo! for Barry Bonds" sign that flashed on the screen at the San Francisco baseball player's home stadium every time he hit a home run
In 1998 Yahoo! was the most popular website in Japan, where 10 million people were online

Chris Charron, an analyst with Forrester Research in Boston, noted, "Users find what they're looking for at Yahoo! While many competitors load their sites with elaborate graphics that can confuse users and delay them, Yahoo!'s site is clear, uncluttered, and fast." A search on competitor Alta Vista might return millions of matches, while the same search on Yahoo! would return a more manageable number of matches arranged in categories.

Edwards also led a so-called guerrilla marketing approach that saw Yahoo! popping up seemingly everywhere, including in magazines and at rock concerts, sports contests, and some unconventional venues. She gave a free auto paint job to any employee who would agree to having the Yahoo! logo displayed on his or her car. The company had a barter deal with the National Football League's 49ers in which the fans shouted, "Yahoo!" to cheer their team as the portal's purple logo burst onto the football stadium screen. Millions saw the Yahoo! Zamboni from the San Jose hockey arena in a scene from the movie EdTV. The Yahoo! logo appeared on a wide array of products, including backpacks, sunglasses, baseballs, computer glasses, skateboards, Slinkys, surfboards, yo-yos, and school stationery.

Some analysts, like those at Fortune, said that these early and inexpensive grassroots promotions were critical in getting Yahoo! far in front of the competition. With little advertising money, Yahoo! often bartered services to expand its reach. And it launched national advertising before nearly all of its competitors. Fortune also lauded Yahoo!'s cobranding of products, services, and contests with well-regarded brands, such as Ben & Jerry's, Visa, and MCI, and with community outreach to 75 nonprofit organizations. All the advertising and marketing would not have helped if Yahoo! did not also evolve and add new services. Users grew accustomed to finding something new at Yahoo! continually. Stock quotes, maps, chat rooms, news, weather, sports, Yellow Pages, and classifieds all broadened the site's appeal and kept its image of being fresh and cool.

Black Rocket's advertising strategy meshed well with Yang's vision of the company. The agency treated Yahoo! not like a technology company but as a consumer brand. "By conjuring up a cool California image—hip but not rad, easy-to-use but not simplistic—it managed to create a cult-like following not unlike that of Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh," said BusinessWeek. As it expanded, Yahoo! kept promoting new services under its single brand name. Competitor Lycos took the opposite strategy and built separately branded sites, including Tripod and WhoWhere.

The Yahoo! name itself paid dividends. The memorable and fun name gained wide credit for helping to attract investor attention and build a following. Black Rocket convinced Yahoo! to use the company name in the advertising slogan because it was unusual, irreverent, and memorable. "The name contains the promise of the product," said Owen Shapiro, senior analyst at market and brand research firm Leo J. Shapiro & Associates in BusinessWeek. "It reinforces the idea that when I go to Yahoo!, I'll be so pleased I'll be Yahooing afterwards." The name also implied that everyone knew what Yahoo! was.

While the early ads in the campaign emphasized Yahoo!'s search engine, by 1998 the company was emphasizing its shopping capabilities with spots showing an Arctic fisherman using Yahoo! to buy a hot tub and an overweight superhero buying handbags through Yahoo! to give to crime victims because he could no longer run down purse snatchers.

As the new century dawned, the idea of "Yahooing" did not catch on with Internet users as the company had hoped. Instead, users began to use the term "Googling" to mean "performing an online search." Nevertheless, Yahoo's brand recognition was still strong, and the company found its own lucrative niche on the Web, supported by new executions of the "Do You Yahoo!?" campaign that promoted Yahoo!'s varied product offerings. For example, one 30-second television spot, which premiered during the 2002 Super Bowl, took place on the island of Palau in Micronesia and featured a tourist and dolphin who both realized that they had settled on their vacation destination by using Yahoo! Campaign spots were also translated into other languages to reach an increasingly global market.

OUTCOME

A rapid rise in its stock price gave Yahoo! a market value of $4.3 billion in early 1998—by far the highest of any Internet company. More people accessed Yahoo! at work than any other website, and it ranked second only to America Online in traffic from home. In February 1998 Yahoo! attracted 31.2 million users to its site, 8 million more than second-place finisher Netscape and 13 million more than third-place finisher Microsoft. In May 1999 Advertising Age named Yahoo! its top marketer in the portal category. The company also regularly ranked among the top five sites in average minutes a user spent online a month, according to Media Metrix. And, unlike many early Internet giants, Yahoo! was profitable.

Yahoo! was not, however, immune to the effects of the dot-com crash that occurred at the start of the twenty-first century. Chief executive Timothy Koogle stepped down in the spring of 2001, and a few months later Karen Edwards, part of the team that had developed the "Do You Yahoo!?" tagline, quit "to spend more time with her family." The company continued to use the tagline for nearly two more years. Black Rocket lost the Yahoo! account in August 2003, and the company's new ad agency developed a marketing campaign anchored by the tagline "Life engine."

LIVE BILLBOARD DATING CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Shortly after its launch in 1994 Yahoo! Inc. became one of the Internet's top search engines. Although the company remained primarily associated with its search engine in subsequent years, it also expanded its business operations to include a range of integrated online products and services, including Yahoo! Personals, America's second-most-popular forum for online dating. In 2004 Yahoo! Personals set out to differentiate itself from competitors by using select members of its paid subscription base as the stars of its online advertising. This effort, dubbed "Project: Real People," was not particularly newsworthy on its own, and Yahoo! Personals did not have a media budget sufficient to achieve saturation among its target market of professional singles. A three-day launch event, the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign," sought to rectify this situation.

The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" was a $140,000 attempt to generate widespread media coverage of the Yahoo! Personals brand. The campaign, which began on January 7, 2004, centered on the efforts of one Yahoo! Personals subscriber, Julie Koehnen, to find an eligible bachelor using the online service. What made the campaign so noteworthy, however, was the fact that Koehnen conducted this search for a date while living, over the course of three days, on a platform erected along the bottom of a highly visible billboard on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The billboard featured Koehnen's Yahoo! Personals photo and text stating, "Julie is looking for a few good dates. (And she's not coming down until she gets them!)" The attached platform offered the amenities necessary for Koehnen to search for dates using Yahoo! Personals and to host romantic prospects live at the billboard before choosing one among the group for further dates. Koehnen's life atop the billboard platform was broadcast, unedited, on the Yahoo! Personals website.

The campaign generated hundreds of stories in the local and national media, including live interviews of Koehnen on such programs as Good Morning America, and it spurred substantial increases in online traffic to the Yahoo! Personals site. Yahoo! Personals overtook Match.com during the first quarter of 2004 to become the nation's leading online dating service. The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" won a Gold EFFIE Award in 2005.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Stanford University Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang, and it quickly became one of the Internet's leading search engines. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the company expanded into a broad range of online communications, content, and shopping products and services, including the dating website Yahoo! Personals, which debuted in 1997.

Yahoo! Personals served as a forum for singles to search for and communicate with prospective romantic partners. A user created his or her own personal profile, including a photo, and could search the profiles of all other users for potential dates. Yahoo! Personals introduced a subscription model into its service in 2001. Users could still search listings for free, but to interact fully with other singles and post one's own profile, a monthly subscription fee was required. Subscription fees discouraged frivolous use, thereby allowing the larger community of users to take the site more seriously. As Yahoo! Personals and its competitors refined their services—the subscription model became the industry standard—more and more Internet-savvy singles turned to such online dating forums. By 2003 the personals category was outperforming all other online revenue sources (excluding gambling and pornography), and Yahoo! Personals was the number two dating service in cyberspace.

Among the primary marketing challenges facing Yahoo! Personals in this rapidly expanding market was the difficulty of differentiating itself from its competitors. Most online dating sites offered roughly the same services at roughly the same prices, and there were limited possibilities for cultivating brand allegiance. Another primary challenge was the still-prevalent, if declining, stigma attached to online dating. Many potential users feared the idea that individuals would misrepresent themselves online; others were worried about the embarrassment connected with telling friends and family that a romantic partner had been located via the Internet.

A 2003 Yahoo! Personals campaign called "Believe," crafted by the advertising agency Black Rocket Euro RSCG, sought to position the company as a source of hope in a bleak world, eschewing sexual messages in print and TV work that focused on the common fears and anxieties, as well as the fundamental optimism, of the dating experience. In 2004 Yahoo! Personals attempted to meet these challenges in a new way by focusing on real people in its advertising. The "Project: Real People" campaign, which was introduced with the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign," was built on a strategy of using actual Yahoo! Personals customers as models in online and print ads. This not only served the purpose of differentiating the brand's communications from those of competitors who employed professional models, but also spoke to the issue of stigmatization by showcasing the attributes of actual users of the service.

TARGET MARKET

The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" had a primary target group of women and a secondary, complementary target group of men. Both groups fit the same profile: 25- to 49-year-old professionals who had never been married, who lived in one of the top 10 Yahoo! Personals urban markets, who were curious but unsure about online dating, and who were interested in an alternative to the dating environment offered by nightclubs and bars.

Like the broader "Project: Real People" effort, the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" counted among its primary goals the destigmatization of online dating as well as the communication of the idea that real people found real romance via the service. The selection of Julie Koehnen as the subject of the campaign was thus calibrated to perform these functions vis-à-vis both target groups. As an attractive, well-spoken 39-year-old screenwriter, she was meant to show the female target group that Yahoo! Personals was an appropriate forum for impressive, interesting women to meet men. Meanwhile, Koehnen was intended to show men that they might meet someone as desirable as her by using Yahoo! Personals. Koehnen selected and conducted her dates live at the billboard site, effectively showcasing the Yahoo! Personals process.

Local and national media outlets were also a crucial target for the hybrid event. The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" sought to make an impression across America with a limited budget, and it could only do so if print publications and TV programs became convinced that it was a newsworthy event. The project was designed specifically to generate media coverage—i.e., free airtime and print space for Yahoo! Personals—and a variety of media outlets were contacted in advance of the January 7 launch so that they would arrive to cover Koehnen's activities live.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

The location for the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign"—the Sunset Strip in Hollywood—was ideal for a number of reasons. First, a warm climate was essential to the event, as the campaign's star, Julie Koehnen, would be living outdoors for three days in midwinter. Also, Los Angeles was one of the top markets for Yahoo! Personals, and within Los Angeles the Sunset Strip had a particularly high concentration of vehicle and foot traffic as well as a trendy reputation that would resonate with the campaign target of single professionals. But other, less obvious factors were also crucial to the selection of this location. The outdoor-advertising company that owned the billboard was able to fit the three-day Yahoo! Personals campaign in between two other, longer-term advertisers—not necessarily an easy scheduling feat—and the prevalence of movie filming in the area made it possible for Yahoo! to acquire the appropriate permits for the live webcast in spite of the unusual filming setup. The various elements of the campaign thus fell into place.

COMPETITION

The leading online dating site prior to the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" was Match.com, which offered a $25 monthly subscription service similar to Yahoo! Personals' $20 service. Match.com, like Yahoo! Personals, built an advertising campaign influenced by reality TV. Helmed by Bartle Bogle Hegarty and debuting in July 2003 on the reality program Cupid, the campaign spots attempted to mimic the spirited bickering characteristic of reality TV, which was often structured around head-to-head competition between participants. The spots opened with the personal-ad photos of two supposed Match.com users, and then the photos morphed into characters who competitively berated one another. For instance, one female addressed a competing Match.com user, pictured alongside a palm tree, with this over-the-top diagnosis of her personality: "You're insane, and I hope you never leave that little island you're stuck on."

Though not among the Internet's most popular dating sites, eHarmony, introduced in 2000, offered a matchmaking formula that distinguished it from most of Yahoo! Personals' competitors, and a correspondingly higher subscription fee made it one of the more lucrative of competing services. Priced at $50 a month, more than twice the cost of Yahoo! Personals, eHarmony claimed to use scientifically sound psychological profiling to match its subscribers with one another. Rather than simply submitting a personal profile and making contacts with prospective dates of their own volition, eHarmony subscribers submitted to a psychological evaluation consisting of 436 questions, and the service used the results to generate a list of compatible fellow subscribers. EHarmony grew from a base of 20,000 subscribers in December 2000 to more than 4.5 million by the end of 2004.

MARKETING STRATEGY

"Project: Real People," a projected yearlong campaign, was built around 50 Yahoo! Personals members chosen from a pool of 38,000 who had responded to a casting call in the months leading up to the launch. The 50 "Project: Real People" participants, representing a diverse cross-section of the online dating community, were photographed for print and online ads that were slated to run in the weeks and months following the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign." Though the idea of using real people to pitch the dating service was unique in the industry, it was of limited news value, and Yahoo! Personals did not have budgetary resources sufficient to achieve saturation via a traditional media campaign.

The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign," largely conceived and implemented by Yahoo! in-house marketers working within a $140,000 budget, was designed to address these issues. Both a three-day launch event for the larger "Project: Real People" campaign and an innovative marketing campaign in its own right, the "Live Billboard" effort was a hybrid of outdoor advertisement, buzz-marketing stunt, and reality TV show starring an actual Yahoo! Personals subscriber. Beyond announcing the "Project: Real People" campaign, the "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" was intended to drive traffic to the Yahoo! Personals website, to spur subscriptions, and to build awareness of the process by which singles met one another using the service.

A billboard on a high-traffic area of the famous Sunset Strip in Hollywood was outfitted with a living room, dining room, and office featuring wireless Internet capability. Julie Koehnen, one of the 50 "Project: Real People" finalists, was singled out for her ability to represent the dynamism, attractiveness, and charm that Yahoo! wanted consumers to associate with users of its online dating service. She was asked to live on the billboard for approximately 12 hours a day from January 7 to January 9, 2004, while conducting a search for dates using Yahoo! Personals.

The focus of Koehnen's days on the billboard was the conducting of this search, made possible by her wireless-equipped office, but she was also treated to a variety of wellness and entertainment services, including yoga sessions and visits from a fortune-teller and a comedian, and she made time for the numerous media interviews that the campaign was intended to generate. Over the course of the three days Koehnen interviewed, in person, three men per day at the billboard. At the end of this process she selected one bachelor to invite back for a date on the final evening of her billboard residency. From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day Koehnen's activities were aired, uncut and unedited, on the Yahoo! Personals website, as "Live Julie TV." The billboard above Koehnen's living space featured her photograph and copy reading, "Julie is looking for a few good dates. (And she's not coming down until she gets them!)" The Yahoo! Personals logo as well as the Web address where users could go to view Koehnen's profile were also prominently showcased.

OUTCOME

The three-day campaign generated 347 television and radio stories in more than 100 American markets, including coverage on every major Los Angeles network affiliate, more than 50 stories on Los Angeles TV stations alone, and live interviews or stories on such national shows as CNN Headline News, Good Morning America, Good Day Live, ABC News Live, and ESPN2's Cold Pizza. Traffic to the Yahoo! Personals website spiked significantly: unique visits increased 19 percent from the two-week period preceding the campaign and increased 44 percent compared to the same period the previous year. More than half a million viewers watched "Live Julie TV" over the course of its three-day run, and Koehnen received more than 1,000 E-mails from Yahoo! Personals subscribers as a result of her billboard residency.

Yahoo! Personals subscriptions increased 199 percent compared with the same period the previous year and 27 percent compared with the two weeks prior to the campaign, and the creation of individual profiles on the site increased by 250 percent and 14 percent respectively, by those same measures. During the first quarter of 2004 Yahoo! Personals overtook Match.com as the most popular online dating service, with an average of 6.4 million visitors per month, compared to Match.com's 5.2 million. The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" won a Gold EFFIE Award in 2005; hosted by the New York American Marketing association, this annual awards event was one of the most prestigious in the advertising industry. "Project: Real People" ran through 2004 and was extended, featuring new batches of Yahoo! Personals subscribers, in subsequent years.