Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has called her first year at Yahoo an aggressive period of “making every day count.” But the 30 days coming up, Yahoo announced Aug. 7, are going to particularly be doozies.
Yahoo plans to unveil a new logo Sept. 4, and to build excitement toward that date, it’s kicked off a 30 days of fun campaign, Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt said in an Aug. 7 post on the Yahoo Tumblr blog.
“Over the past year, there’s been a renewed sense of purpose and progress at Yahoo, and we want everything we do to reflect this spirit of innovation,” wrote Savitt. “While the company is rapidly evolving, our logo—the essence of the brand—should too.
Spoiler alert: It’s not going to change the three things that some say are awful about the logo: the purple, the yodel and the exclamation point.
(When Drew Olanoff blogged May 28 to say he was leaving TechCrunch to join Yahoo’s PR team, he promised to “see what I can do about that exclamation mark.”)
Savitt continued, “The new logo will be a modern redesign that’s more reflective of our reimagined design and new experiences. To get everyone warmed up, we are kicking off 30 days of change. Beginning now, we will display a variation of the logo on our home page and throughout our network in the U.S. for the next month.”
Mayer’s first year at Yahoo included a slew of changes, from Google-inspired decisions to make cafeteria food free for employees and to hold an all-hands-on-deck meeting every Friday, to nearly 20 acquisitions.
Early this month Yahoo continued its buying streak with the acquisition of RockMelt (for reportedly between $60 million and $70 million, according to AllThingsD).
“Rockmelt was designed to make sense of the Internet,” Yahoo product heads Mike Kerns and Adam Cahan said in an Aug. 2 post on the Yahoo blog. “The team has built a simple and beautiful technology that combines social, personalization and discovery to help you not only find what you’re looking for, but also stumble across some cool stuff along the way.”
Personalization is a major focus for Mayer. In her first major interview as CEO, she spoke at length about how it was the next big opportunity in search—one of Yahoo’s core businesses.
There’s an opportunity to understand “What do I know already? What are my preferences? And how to present that information,” Mayer told Bloomberg Television Jan. 27. “And I think that extends beyond just search but broadly to discovery. We can think about, how do we take the Internet and order it for you? There are all of these news feeds … the question is, really, what order should people read things in, in the morning?”
During Yahoo’s July 16 earnings call, Mayer continued to emphasize the need for personalization, calling video a “huge opportunity.”
“We really need to have a perfect platform … but this is really about the technology—the technology of serendipity and personalization … and that’s really where our focus is going to be for the next year, on really building out the technological platform and one that really attracts users,” said Mayer.
Those wanting to track Yahoo’s process of evolving its logo (making it more personal?) can visit Yahoo.com/dailylogo.