Yahoo! in late September launched a global brand campaign — it broke in India early October — with a budget of over $100 million. This is a huge initiative from the Sunnyvale, California-headquartered internet services provider to recover the ground it has lost to rivals. It is also the first big move aimed at brand and market development from Carol Bartz after she took over as the CEO of the company from co-founder Jerry Yang early this year. India is a part of this campaign. And the person driving it is Executive Vice-president & Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele. Before she signed up with Yahoo! in March this year, Steele led the global brand strategy and integrated marketing of NetApp. She talks to Bhupesh Bhandari on the campaign and the other marketing strategies she has planned for Yahoo!.
What is it that the new campaign has set out to achieve?
We don’t need to work on our brand recall. It is universal across the globe, which is a fabulous part of the equity of our brand. Over the last couple of years, we probably lost some singular direction. We have worked hard to get that back and unify our vision about who we are and what we want to provide to our consumers. So we are investing in this campaign. India is one of the key markets we are committed to.
There are really two goals. One is long term — to build the brand equity of Yahoo!. It’s one of our most important assets. And the second, which is short term, is to have people experience the new products we have introduced.
What do the early results show?
In India, the response to the campaign has been fabulous. We have had a 250 per cent increase in our home page usage since we launched the campaign. We are very excited about that. But we also know that it’s been less than a month and we want sustainable results. We will monitor and optimise all the time.
How is it outside India?
In the US, we have a different goal. Our goal there is more about engagement and how to have people spend more time on Yahoo!, trying out different aspects of our site. In India, what is so exciting is that you have so many new consumers coming online and to the mobile phone to access the internet. We want to make sure that they know about Yahoo!. So, the goals differ a little.
What is the share of online conversation your campaign has bagged?
We have started to monitor that. It’s in our plan, though we haven’t measured it yet to report a number. The social media is really a key element of our campaign — dialogue with not just consumers but also advertisers. In terms of time spent on Yahoo!, it is quite amazing in India — nearly 30 minutes per visit. It is literally double the average time spent in the US and elsewhere. We want to make sure that we provide what people are looking for from the internet. People are really getting what they want from Yahoo! in India and, as a matter of fact, the cricket experience is a big driver of that usage.
Where exactly was Yahoo! losing out to rivals? What are the issues that the current campaign seeks to address?
There are two things — one from the market perspective and the other from the Yahoo! perspective. One of the first things we did after I joined was some primary research across focused groups in several countries to understand what consumers, not just those who use Yahoo! but all internet users, want. What we discovered universally was that no matter where they live or what language they speak, people want the web to be personal to them. They want to be able to get what they need. The personally-relevant experience is very important for customers, though people have different needs. We wanted to address this because Yahoo! is poised very well to deliver it.
From the Yahoo! perspective, there has been, maybe not in the consumers’ mind but in the business media, some confusion about what is its strategy. We had a number of things that happened in the last couple of years that caused businesses to ask where were we are going? So it is important for us to get back into the market. We have a new management team and a new CEO, and we have spent a significant effort in figuring out together our key strategy. The brand expression came out of that work.
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You have used the mass media in India for the new campaign. But internet users are largely young people. So, isn’t their a lot of wastage in mass media?
I think it depends on how you use it. We are contributing in our campaign 25 per cent of the money online. Our customers, particularly those in India, spend 3 per cent online. On the other hand, mass media plays a role for us today because we are really announcing who we are and what we are doing; we want to make a disruptive play in the market place. So, surround sound is important — television, print, pout-of-home and online all at the same time. As we go into the mature aspects of the campaign, we are going to move much more towards product features and adoptions so that our consumers know exactly how they can experience Yahoo!. You will see the campaign more online than you have seen so far. Mass media has really worked for us to get to the market place and have consumers see what Yahoo! is up to.
What is the focus segment for Yahoo! in terms of demographics?
We have younger users in India and other south Asian countries. But Yahoo! has a number of offerings for different age groups. We do have a very significant focus on women. They are a big focus of our advertisers, so we help them reach their markets. That’s a huge value proposition to our advertisers. We generally have a 50:50 split between men and women. India has a significantly higher percentage of male users of internet — almost 70 per cent. It came out the highest in the research that we have done across nine countries.
Did this make you tweak your campaign in India?
Yes. We did it in the creatives, in being able to have messages that would resonate with men, in sports, cricket, how the delivery of images was done in the campaign. We do have women in the campaign too.
How does the consumer spend time on Yahoo!?
Ninety-seven per cent of the time people are doing other things than search on Yahoo!. So search is just 3 per cent. E-mail has very rich use on Yahoo!. More and more people want to connect online. This is what Yahoo! is doing though our social features, whether on mail products or buzz marketing or comment on articles. It is really important to create that conversation with the community. More and more people are spending time doing that.
Our strategy is not to be a social destination. It is to be the destination where people go to get what they need on the internet. We want to provide the best of the web to you. So, if you have a passion for Facebook, you can out it up on your Yahoo! homepage. So, it’s really the concept of delivering the experience between your personal world and the world.
How much of the traffic is for news?
As consumers are coming online for news, it is not necessarily true that advertisers are also shifting their money to online. The key challenge is to help advertisers and other providers reach these consumers. Many of them access news on their mobile phone. That is the key to our strategy, including in India.
In India, only 3 per cent of the advertising dollar is spent online. It is nowhere near the activity of consumers online. Yahoo! is perfectly positioned to reach those audiences because we have over 70 per cent reach in India. We need to help advertisers so that they can reach their goals. There are branded goals and there are performance goals. In performance, it is pretty well accepted that online can be your key investment because it is easy to measure. It is in the second category of creating a brand that online hasn’t traditionally been used. That’s an area we want to innovate. The story for advertisers is pretty strong in India — we are number one in email, we are number one in front page and cricket.
How much of the advertising dollar is being spent online in mature markets?
It is under 5 per cent. So, the upside is huge.