So Yahoo is launching its "single largest global integrated marketing campaign" ever. You can read their EVP of Marketing's letter to ... ummmm, You.  Yep, their new campaign is that Yahoo is under new management.... You.

view the letter here

I'm going to go in to a rant here. This is a dumb campaign. Why? Because Yahoo is not about ME. It's not about me, you, we or us. I use Yahoo finance. When I go to their homepage they have a stupid banner that pops up and shifts the screen down. What this does is that when I click on the Yahoo finance tab there is two second delay, the screen shifts down, and the stupid facebook link gets clicked. Not only that, but when I type in yahoo.com it actually sends me to yahoo.ca (the Canadian site, instead of the US site - which is annoying because I'm not looking for Canadian info, so I've got to switch to the US site).

Yahoo actively makes it hard for me to use their service. Why? Because THEY want to control what information I access and how and make it a pain in the butt to get what I want.

So this marketing campaign is idiotic because it does not reflect how their business does business.

If I were the PR guy at Yahoo I'd be in the VP of Marketing's office with a perplexed look on my face asking: "Really? This is what we are going to try and jam down people's throats? You're serious?"

The whole 'YOU' marketing angle is an uncreative and tired tactic that is over used. Any product that people are using can be positioned as about 'them'. When companies pull out the 'YOU' campaign what it tells me is that they have no strategic direction, no salient value proposition, and so fall back on basically trying to flatter the customer in hopes that appealing to some 'pet their ego' paradigm will actually lead to brand loyalty.

Some products are actually unique enough that they could be positioned using the 'YOU" strategy and work. Teeth whitening comes to mind for instance - that's definitely a YOU type of service - there's basically no reason to get it other than your own desire to have white teeth.

What really makes me laugh is that a company like Google - who probably actually thinks about YOU more than any other company - never actually markets itself with the whole 'YOU' angle. When you think Google you don't think 'ME' (or YOU if you will), you think innovation. If you're a tech company and your marketing angle isn't all about innovation, then you are basically barking up the wrong tree.

And just to clarify... I have no problem with marketing one's value to the user. It's with using the word 'YOU' specifically. It implies a personalization and a benefit specific to you - whereas most products are the same whether it's you buying them or someone else. They aren't tailored to YOU -  YOU must tailor your behaviors around THEM.

Anyway, I feel bad for Yahoo's PR folks, who will have to go out and communicate this ridiculous marketing campaign to reporters.