A marketing blitz by Yahoo with television and radio advertising will culminate Friday with a coupon offering free Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to those who set their browser home pages to Yahoo.
As an AP report suggested, Yahoo may be feeling some brand erosion when it comes to search. Google has become so synonymous with online searching that Merriam-Webster declared Google a transitive verb. Yahoo and other search engines substantially lag behind Google in US search market share.
Yahoo will advertise on TV and radio, and place ads in movie theaters to let people know about changes the company has made to its home page, email service, and Yahoo! Answers. The latter service has become enormously popular and Yahoo has been aggressively driving more traffic to it.
The search advertising market has swung heavily in Google’s favor. While Google has enjoyed multi-billion dollar revenues and a high-flying stock price, Yahoo’s stock price has not been performing robustly. Trailing in paid search has not helped matters:
To make things worse, Google has become synonymous with looking things up on the Internet without having to spend on expensive TV and radio ads.
“Instead of worrying about branding, Google is able to spend time and money on building better algorithms to help people find information and data,” said Regis McKenna, who helped steer the marketing campaigns of high-tech Apple Computer Inc. and Intel Corp.
Yahoo noted in a statement how their campaign would take a tongue-in-cheek look at life with and without the company in users’ lives. The new ads examine life’s pitfalls, from dealing with the school bully to weeds in the garden. Each spot exaggerates a bad scenario with a character who doesn’t use Yahoo!, and then humorously plays out the same scenario again to show how good life is with Yahoo!
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
