Confession
This is an awkward moment. As an ex Yahoo! employee, I want Yahoo! to do well, but as a marketer I wasn't buying into their new advertising concept, developed by Ogilvy. In fact, I was so frustrated with the print creatives that I the 22nd of Sep tweeted:
"I'm so not impressed. I can't belive Yahoo! is going to burn $100M dollar on this crap!"
The chart above might prove me right. It also proves that most people can tell good advertising from bad.
Unfortunately, Yahoo! Marketing Execs and Ogilvy creative masterminds couldn't get the print ads to match the TV-commercial. Because the TV-commercial looks good, has a nice voice over and better copy.
Still, I'm afraid it won't work. It's a feel-good movie, trying to reach everyone everywhere. I don't think that it's possible. It's spreading to thin, not unlike what Yahoo! as a company used to do!
It's complicated
A sign that Yahoo! is not happy with the campaign results came today, when Silicon Alley Insider reported that Yahoo! "soft fired" Ogilvy, it's long time advertising agency. Yahoo has hired Omnicom Group (OMC) agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to lead its creative, advertising, digital marketing and strategic planning.
Sounds good, but will actually get complicated.
Allthingsd.com reports that While Goodby will lead on creative initiatives worldwide, Ogilvy will remain in the mix, focusing on international marketing efforts, including upcoming brand launches in France, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Brazil and Indonesia. Via Neo and Mindshare, Ogilvy will also run all media buying globally.
Yahoo is also keeping strategic branding form Landor & Associates, who together with Goodby and Ogilvy be part of a Brand Advisory Board at the purple Internet giant.
My own experience is that it's not always easy to get agencies to work together. At one point or another, most of them want to be the top dog. Another problem might be that they will try to blame another agency for things that are not working very well.
It will be interesting to see how this setup works out for Yahoo!
My five cents on what really happened
I believe Yahoo! is not happy at all with the results of the advertising campaign. Why else would they invest that kind of money into producing the creatives and the TV-commercial and then suddenly switch advertising agency!?
What surprises me is if Yahoo!, Ogilvy and Mindshare didn't test the advertising creatives and the TV-commercial before running the campaign!? And if they did, how come the research didn't indicate that the audience wasn't buying into the creatives?
Someone always has to pay
If you look at the chart above, it's all gone Pete Thong. When things go wrong in advertising, someone has to pay. In this case it's Ogilvy who will loose the Yahoo! account.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are going to be some casualties among the Yahoo! Marketing Execs as well. They created this campaign together with Ogilvy and someone should be held responsible for it.
Mostly because if the campaign hadn't launched, it would be money on the bank.
If I just decided to spend $ 100 million on advertising and saw my BrandIndex Buzz drop after the campaign launch - I'd be worried. I would be even more worried if I didn't see the the number of Unique Visitors or Search Volumes increase during the campaign period.
Why?
Because the whole point of spending money on advertising is to earn more money than you spend. Yahoo! makes most of it's revenues from advertising. Can they earn more money from each visitor to their properties, then they spend to get them to visit, the formula works.
The numbers of monthly unique visitors and search volumes are early indicators if the Ogilvy campaign is working or not. If the campaign is working, let's hope Yahoo! managed to sell most of it's ad inventory in order to benefit from the the increasing traffic volumes.
I honestly don't know how Yahoo! is doing - but anyone who have access to Compete.com or Nielsen Netratings account should be able to see if there is a positive or negative trend when it comes to the monthly unique visitors during the period that the advertising campaign has been running.
Let's just hope that the traffic volumes trend is more positive than the chart above might indicate.
