CEO Carol Bartz Kicks Off Yahoo Branding Campaign

NEW YORK - Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz announced a global branding campaign for the company, in a high-profile Sept. 22 presentation the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square.

The announcement is part of Yahoo’s larger campaign to show its viability and competitiveness in the wake of a recent partnership deal with Microsoft and months of market-share battering by Google.

Yahoo’s new tagline is, “It’s You!” The "Y" in that slogan incorporates Yahoo’s exclamation-point logo. The campaign will start on Sept. 28 in the United States, before rolling out to more countries in the coming weeks. Yahoo plans on committing $100 million to the campaign, which will last 15 months.

As part of the “You” campaign, Yahoo has also been emphasizing key changes to its core products, including the ability to consolidate favorite content and sites onto a single user page, streamlined photo editing and sharing, mobile video capability, and a new mobile homepage with a variety of apps. Yahoo is also emphasizing changes to its front-end search experience, despite the company’s search being powered by Microsoft’s Bing by 2010.  

Bartz indicated that the cutting and streamlining begun under her tenure would continue, even in the midst of the new campaign.

“The focus of the company is really to engage and personalize Yahoo for the users, and to do that, we need to be ready to put our signature on the bottom of every page on the Internet that has yahoo on it,” Bartz said. “Things that might have been a good idea several years ago… we’re really revisiting everything. Where it makes sense, we will sell, and where it makes sense, we will shut down.”

Bartz also suggested that this new campaign could ultimately attract more advertisers and improve the company’s bottom line.

“Advertisers follow consumers, and if you want to talk in sort of parlance of advertising, you always need to build circulation. By having more and more engaged users around the world, we’re building circulation,” Bartz said. “By doing this very personalized approach, get really good micro-insights for our advertisers. Consumers want good advertising, that’s meaningful to them, and advertisers want to deliver that.”

Video will play a big role in Yahoo’s overall strategy for the campaign, Bartz added.

“Video is so crucial to our users and our advertisers, because video is an interesting and emotional way to tell a story, to entertain, to inform, to share. There’s a big emphasis inside Yahoo on our video platform,” Bartz said. “Big cornerstone of our strategy is video.”