Are you aware what business you are in? Lessons from Yahoo!
The story of Yahoo is an amazing story of the Internet and how quickly it moves and how ruthless it really is.
I had lunch with Lewis Gersh the other day and we talked about the big ones — AOL, MySpace — but also the long list of others — GeoCities, Excite, Altavista, LetsBuyIt, Interworld, Netscape, The Globe, QXL — that crossed industries and have all disappeared. The question of why is of course different for each one, but here is a very insightful post from someone that was inside Yahoo before Google was founded.
The big lesson I take from below? Realize that if you rely on a website to succeed, you are a software company. If you don’t understand how to get the best developers and keep them, you will fail.
In my world of creative agencies we spend a lot of time understanding how to get and maintain the best creative culture. How long before we realize we’re in the software business as well?
August 2010
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.
What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
Money
The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons. He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results. Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but by the bid times the average amount a user would buy. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
iris gets PocketTV on Channel 4
This is a great example of how branded content, well executed, can grow bigger than a marketing campaign and generate real revenue back to the brand and agency. Great work iris!
Channel 4 to air Sony Ericsson mobile programme
Sony Ericsson’s mobile music and entertainment programme, ‘Pocket TV’, is to air for the first time on Channel 4.
Pocket TV: Sony Ericsson mobile programme to air on Channel 4
Channel 4 has acquired the rights to the show, which has been a hit online and on mobile platforms, attracting 8.4 million views across YouTube, PS3/VidZone and MSN during series two.
The show, developed by Iris as branded content for Sony Ericsson, was originally created for the mobile platform and hosted a number of four- to six-minute interviews and live music tracks from artists including Ellie Goulding, Chipmunk and Sean Kingston.
A TV version will now be aired on Channel 4’s T4 and 4Music slots from 4 August.
The programme will include 11-minute shows featuring three videos each. The programme’s dedicated YouTube channel will run until the end of December.
Shaun McIlrath, executive creative director of Iris, said: “This is a great example of a marketing asset generating a value of its own because of the audience it has created. ‘Pocket TV’ has become quite a phenomenon”.
This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk
Case Study: Digital Winning Big Brand Awareness
Today as ever brand marketers are wrestling with how much of their media spend to put online and are looking for case studies that allow them to “trust digital media” the way they do traditional media. All of the unique visitor metrics and total impressions numbers aside, there remains a confidence gap until big brands start to circulate big cases where digital has delivered big results.
Now they are starting to come in like this one from Ford published in the WARC News Email:
In April, Ford, the automaker, asked 100 influential US bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a period of six months, and regularly post their opinions of the car on portals like Facebook and Twitter.
By October, it estimated that the resulting material had received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr.
According to Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing, recognition rates of the Fiesta have grown rapidly, despite the fact it won’t be available until mid-2010.
“If you would have told me that we would have 100 vehicles in the US … and we would have 60% brand awareness in the segment, I would have said there is no possible way,” he said.
“To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million (€33.6m; £29.9m),” continued Farley, who added that the web is now a viable, and more low-cost, alternative to these channels.
“Online has become mass media. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before.”
In April, Ford, the automaker, asked 100 influential US bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a period of six months, and regularly post their opinions of the car on portals like Facebook and Twitter.
By October, it estimated that the resulting material had received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr.
According to Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing, recognition rates of the Fiesta have grown rapidly, despite the fact it won’t be available until mid-2010.
“If you would have told me that we would have 100 vehicles in the US … and we would have 60% brand awareness in the segment, I would have said there is no possible way,” he said.
“To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million (€33.6m; £29.9m),” continued Farley, who added that the web is now a viable, and more low-cost, alternative to these channels.
“Online has become mass media. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before.”
