Yahoo is showing off a new advertising campaign it’s running for General Mills. A spokesperson for Yahoo tells murdok it’s a “good example of how advertisers are turning to Yahoo for more than a typical search or display ad buy.”
General Mills is targeting “boomers” with the campaign, which is themed around “vitality” and is a content-based program. It includes news content, as well as retirement, travel-related content, and games.
The campaign includes a program header, which includes navigation for users to access news, games, etc. General Mills will include product media within the individual experiences over the course of the campaign, and will measure the effectiveness of the campaign through Yahoo’s Consumer Direct Program, which lets retailers track offline sales spurred by online ad campaigns.
Yahoo Games and Yahoo News will feature “vitality-themed” content:
– Focused on healthy living for Boomers
– Integrated/supported by their respective properties
– Linked to each other so users can easily find the Vitality areas on Yahoo and navigate to the relevant content
Yahoo’s News experience page is a custom Vitality section. When users click to read an article, they stay within the experience. The Yahoo Games Experience is called Yahoo Brain Games, and features several “brain” games such as Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and Mahjong solitaire. The Brain Games promotional position on the front page of Games will point users into the Vitality Brain Games for the entire campaign.
“General Mills’ Vitality campaign is a great example of how brands are working with Yahoo! to develop custom campaigns that bring together content around a specific topic to reach a large targeted audience segment,” says Yahoo. “Boomers are the fastest growing audience online, and with this campaign General Mills has created a relevant experience that connects with the boomer audience.”
The campaign illustrates an interesting way to capture the specific demographic that the advertiser is going after, by bringing the content that is also aimed (at least partially) at that demographic together, creating a whole new entity on the site with the purpose of accommodating targeted ads. It’s not exactly a new concept, but can prove to be an effective one.
