Earlier today we mentioned that Yahoo!, under the control of CEO Carol Bartz, will spend another $75-85 million on an ad campaign that basically makes fun of Google since the $100 million they spent on the “It’s You!” campaign was a complete failure. Business Insider gets all up in Goodby’s business for selling Yahoo! the new campaign. The post is naïve on BI’s part, if not correct. Here’s why.
Writes Henry Blodget: “…in the history of the Internet, offline advertising has never really made much of a difference in building a sustainable online audience.”
Well, sort of. There’s GoDaddy, Hulu and Zappos — though the latter two were already successful before they began advertising. And Hulu isn’t doing so great anymore. Well, as great. But he’s right, companies that live online have traditionally* done better in their own realm.
He continues: “And since Carol is new to the consumer Internet business, we imagine it seems intuitive to her that offline advertising will work (after all, Walmart advertises!)…We’re just guessing, but we also imagine that Yahoo’s new ad agency, Goodby, didn’t explain that to Carol. Otherwise Carol would have spent the $85 million on product development or online ads or Google keywords or something.”
It’s odd that a writer covering business would take this opinion when Goodby is merely doing business. Should they have walked away from a pay day because the campaign wouldn’t work? He’s talking about David Ogilvy style advertising, which is ironic as hell given Yahoo! fired the agency.
Regardless of how this campaign came to be, Goodby did exactly what they should have: make that money. Though the business isn’t supposed to be about giving the client what they want, you all know that’s what ends up happening.
Case in point: don’t shoot the messenger. Goodby’s got mouths to feed and until someone tips us off as to who made which decision about how to handle this, we can only speculate as to why Yahoo! has now wasted $185 million (between Ogilvy and Goodby) on advertisements while Google is spending half that amount to pay for windmill farms in North Dakota.
One final thought: a source tapped into the Yahoo! world tells us the $75-85 million sum is “a subset of the initial $100 million campaign”. This source claims the Goodby campaign comes from the initial sum. We have yet to verify this claim but if true raises a few questions — and from a PR standpoint helps Yahoo’s case, a little. It’s still $75-85 million not well spent, but that’s better than $175-185 million not-well spent.
*as far as the existence of tradition goes in this field