You have to forgive me but I’ve been mesmerized by the Erin Andrews/Elizabeth Hasselbeck feud and I haven’t been following the news lately…
Did I hear right? Yahoo! is spending $75 to $85 million on a new marketing/advertising campaign?
Didn’t they just plop down over $100 mill on a marketing/advertising campaign?
So that comes to what, about $185 million in less than 10 months? My, what big ad budgets you have…
Hopefully the new campaign will fare better than the first.
According to comScore, after the $100 million plus buy in September ’09, Yahoo saw the number of unique visitors to its various sites decline 2.6% to 155.6 million in April and total page views on its properties have declined 11.4%.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all saw increases in U.S. visitors and page views during the same period.
Do you think someone should tell Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz that none of this will work? Surely their ad agency du jour won’t.
The reason these campaigns won’t work is simple. Offline advertising doesn’t help build an online audience, customer base and all that good stuff.
Quick, when’s the last time you saw an ad for Facebook? Or Wikipedia? Or even Amazon?
And other than this below, their recent Super Bowl spot, when was the last time you saw an ad for Google?
As the chart below clearly indicates, there is a serious imbalance between who uses Yahoo! and where they’re generating revenue from… and something tells me an $85 million offline campaign is not going to do much to offset the imbalance..
Perhaps the money would be better spent on innovation, new technologies, a Social Media campaign, a really good coffeemaker…
Andy Beal, editor of the website Marketing Pilgrim, put it best…
“I would argue that consumers have already made a decision: They are aware of what Yahoo has to offer, and they’ve decided there are better alternatives for their time.”
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