14 DAY TRIAL // If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, every morning as of last week must have stung your ear with something that seemed off somehow, but you couldn't quite figure out what it was. How about Yahoo! ads on the radio, that doesn't really sound right for an Internet company, or at least it leaves listeners with the feeling that the airwaves are better for reaching the target audience instead of the web, and to me that is just wrong.
Remember the Pepsi vs. Coca Cola ads with the kid that buys two of the latter to step on in order to reach the Pepsi button? That's pretty much how this campaign is highlighting Yahoo! Search over Google's similar product: "Search engines like Google get you lost in all the links, but not Yahoo search." The ad continues by mentioning the drop-down menus with related suggestions introduced last year, so that can't have caught on as well as the management had thought it would. "You won't find that on your Google page!," the advertisement underlines before the all-too-known Yahoo! yodel at the very end.
"The rationale is we feel like we've built a better mouse trap and, quite frankly, we wanted to remind users that there really is a choice in search engines," vice president of marketing for the Yahoo Search Team Raj Gossain said. "We've got a better, simpler, easier-to-use mouse trap." I don't like being compared to a pesky rodent under any situation, but apart from that, the intended end result of the ads is something extremely difficult to accomplish. Once people get the habit of automatically typing 'Google' in the URL box, no advertising is going to change that. Better try with electroshocks, Raj, but I'm not quite sure how you'll get that past the board and the human rights organizations.