No yodelling: Yahoo plans to show or tell?

First, Yahoo CEO Carol Barth tells analysts that she needs to spend to protect the brand. Then new Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele says a new slogan might be something like "Yahoo, your home on the web' (here). Now, rumors are that what Yahoo learned in the Microsoft deal is to spend like a drunken sailor on advertising (here).

Starting in September, we can expect a media blitz on why you should make Yahoo your home on the web, which is interesting for a few reasons:

1. According to this article (on Yahoo, nonetheless), Yahoo's prospective new slogan and reference to 'the Web' seem, I don't know, dated? If they were hip squares, maybe they'd go with 'Yahoo: your pillow in da' cloudz'.

2. But seriously, speaking of vaporous ideas, the notion that Yahoo wants to be the home base for our online lives is sweet. Unfortunately for Yahoo, we're not currently homeless online. We have many homes...all LinkedIn, Twittified, and FriendFeeded...inhabited by our online relationships. Yahoo can be a part of that...a mail account or a forum in one of Yahoo's channels...but Yahoo is a tool. And a hammer does not a home make.

3. Which leads me to tools (no, not the kind on VH1's Tool Academy). If Yahoo wants to elevate the brand, or reposition it, I'd suggest investing in creating something useful, usable, and desirable...like Google continuously does (tried Google Reader?), or even, ahem, Microsoft (Office 2010 anyone?).

For a company like Yahoo, advertising should generate awareness of great new functions...the functions will take care of the positioning through the user experience...in other words, design the right functions, and you've designed the Brand Experience.

I have to confess, I still have MyYahoo set as my browser home page. Yahoo has a wonderful history of creating things, like My Yahoo, that work. They've lost their way in middle age, though, trying to be so many things but special at nothing. They haven't stayed with the pack.

So here's to hoping that any advertising investment is actually based on articulating wonderful new tools that redefine the My Yahoo brand experience. Tools that actually help people in a manner that reflects the user's centrality in the brand experience. Rather than telling me your mine, make yourself mine.

The alternative would be trying to re-position via advertising alone...that's not merely a 'cost that is in the system', it's a pretty traditional approach. And that looks alot like the whimsical road they've been down before: fun ad, unmet functional expectation.

Intrusion + Interruption: Positioning the advertising?

We've talked about banner blindness, ad deflation and the general tendency of users to despise unrequested interruption online...and offline.  And yet, the online ad industry sees fit to shout out that the web needs more intrusion and disruption if the ad business is to combat these ills. 

Examples:

1. Three new formats are proposed by the Online Publishers Association (here). These new 'super banners' will eliminate the annoying tendency of banners to get out of the way when a user scrolls, to suffer from 'banner blindness' and generally being ignored, and require a site's users to pay...with their attention.
   
2. VideoEgg calls for more intrusion and awareness to salvage the online medium as a branding medium, using 'interruption, cool, and rich media' (here)
3. Short Tail Media (you just know where this is headed) CEO David Payne calls for a return to the successful tactics of the 1950s, when TV invented the successful approach to interruption + attention we now call ads. (here).

We can all agree that publishers need better ways to monetize content. And that's an entirely different post. The challenge with the publishing business going back to what it's known is, well, going backward...not forward. 

The best part of the whole debate about interruption is that, online, it's a thoroughly testable proposition. We need not debate the search-based approach to advertising (the unintrusive kind)...we know it works and why. But for the very few sites that truly command monopoly attention (um, the Short Tail sites?), forcing users to endure interruptive advertising may work...I say go for it, and let us all know how that turns out for you! 

For the other 110 million sites that aren't ESPN or CNN and who have to compete for the long- tail user's attention, beware: an interruptive ad experience may just define your site's brand experience in totality. It would be a sad day indeed when an online brand ends up positioning itself based on its advertising style.