Yahoo Rolls Out Massive $100 Million Ad Campaign

Yahoo officially announced its new advertising campaign set to begin next week. Rumored for a couple of weeks, the company finally confirmed it yesterday during Advertising Week in New York. The focus of the campaign is “you” with the tag line “It's Y!ou” and no, that's not a typo. As usual, Yahoo is never one afraid of living at the cutting edge of grammar abuse.

“The core of our message will focus on YOU. It will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. That’s because Yahoo! really is all about you — we’re constantly evolving to give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. We want you to make the Web your own and are designing products to put you in the driver’s seat of your Internet experience. Our new brand positioning reflects that,” Elisa Steele, Yahoo's own chief marketing officer, wrote.

As for the campaign itself, it will be launched next week in the US and then follow along with UK and India in October and the rest of the world in early 2010. Other countries will include Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan and the ads will be “everywhere,” on TV, radio, print, outdoor and, of course, online. It looks like most of the “over $100 million” budget has been set apart for buying ad space rather than for the creative part but maybe brute force will work out in the end. It sure did wonders for Microsoft, after all.

Yahoo stresses, yet again, that the campaign is just a way for users to realize what is already there and to make them aware of the direction Yahoo has been heading lately, focusing on some core businesses and better integration between them. The redesigned homepage will be the center of the experience, the users’ “home online,” and the company plans to roll out improved photo and video services and “much, much better email.” It also just launched a new search interface in anticipation of the Microsoft merger.