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Yahoo shouts with $100M, users yawn
Yahoo just spent $100 million shouting at people... what did that buy them?
Yahoo launched a $100 million ad campaign on September 22 to promote its homepage and websites with the catchy slogan "It's Y!ou".So far, it looks like the campaign isn't paying off. Uniques to the site on a weekly basis are basically unchanged since the campaign started, according to data from comScore.
Where have I heard this before... a search engine betting the farm on an ad campaign rather than investing it in the user experience?
Ahh yes!
Microsoft's Bing search engine... coincidentally, also a hundred million dollar ad campaign that has, at best, realized mixed outcomes.
Yahoo and Microsoft shouldn't feel alone, though - this strategy has been tried many times over the years. One of my most popular columns, from 2004, is Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience - about a company that tried (and, unshockingly, failed) to succeed with the gazillion-dollar-ad-campaign-leading-to-a-ho-hum-user-experience strategy.
(With an acronym like GDACLTAHHUE, how could that strategy fail?)
Yahoo can advertise all it likes but it's fighting a losing battle. At the day it ALL comes down to the product. And Google have the edge. And in this game being second best is not good enough. I doubt if Yahoo will even EXIST as a company in another 10 years - think Enron, etc.
Because remember kids, you'll win if you have a great user experience, even if people don't know you exist.
Mark, nice contrast with an item I saw today at appleinsider.com about the runaway success of RedLaser on the iPhone. The only promotion was from happy users.
"After a slow start with no publicity, RedLaser (iTunes link) became one of the best-selling applications on the iPhone by the end of September. Currently, according to MobileCrunch, the software is selling about 6,000 copies per day, and has earned well over $1 million in revenue from more than 750,000 downloads. It has been consistently in the top 5 paid applications of the App Store for the last three months.
'Co-Founder Jeff Powers says that though the app hit the market in May, it wasn’t getting any traction,' the report said. 'After releasing an update to the app which made it "actually work," according to Jeff, they saw a dramatic increase in sales. This was despite the fact that they did nothing different upon the re-launch and got almost zero press pickup when they updated the app. The hypothesis is that this came entirely from word-of-mouth sales, which is probably a good bet. Who wouldn’t want to show off to their friends the cool new barcode-scanning price-checking app on their phone?' "
I worked as a designer in the search division of AltaVista from 1999-2000 and watched this happen first-hand. The management at CMGI wanted a big huge splashy marketing-driven releaunch while this weird little project at Stanford called Google was just being spun off into a company. Those of us in product development were pushing for better results, more user testing and we even proposed that AV buy Google. All was ignored and the biggest media item about the launch were complaints about an ad where someone got in a serious car accident. What followed was a long slide into obscurity and irrelevance.
Marketing can buy shoppers but not customers. I went to Bing after it relaunched, played around with it a little and then went back to ignoring it.
James - thanks for sharing that funny/sad experience.. if anything I'd say they're all too common, even today, in companies that persist in ignoring their users in favor of the desires of everyone (anyone!) else.
Yahoo's UI, and I think overall usability in home page and mail products, is far superior to Google's. I wish Yahoo would focus on those products instead of generic search. I don't want Yahoo to fail.