Yahoo Tries to Recover From "It's Y!ou" Ad Disaster by Attacking Google's One Box (This Is Going to End in Tears)

Elisa Steele and her brand team are amateurs plain and simple…extremely scripted and predictable. eyes must roll into the back of employees heads whenever she speaks. there is no artistry, comedy, savviness in their efforts – and zero connection to real users. and most importantly there is absolutely nothing brand defining in the efforts… “a place where people don’t understand your point” is more appropriate. For the sake of the internet as a whole please send them back to enterprise marketing where true creativity and a real consumer brand is not needed. Its very very sad effort and must be a sad day in Sunnyvale. Jeff Goodby must be bummed he’s been forced to place this in his portfolio.

Why do they have to compete? I use chrome so I don't ever go to google's homepage, just simply start typing in the address bar. Yahoo is still always open on my first tab (mainly for financial news which is why I am here), and google voice is open on the second. Hotmail is actually sync'd up via outlook connector and all e-mail from gmail and yahoo are forwarded to hotmail. It all can coexist just fine.

As for accounts, yeah it's getting a little ridiculous. They have to be somewhere in the 30 range for me, and ironically I just added another one to post this.

Yahoo! does have one major thing going for them – Yahoo! Pipes and its successor, Yahoo! Query Language. The rest of it has little or no unique value IMHO.

Baby boomer? Wrong age. Yahoo's record of innovation of late has been weak.

Oh dear.

Google's white box forces me to think, to make choices about what to type in, to go where my thoughts take me.

Why then did I not figure out that I am a collage of services that I did not know I needed. Moreover I feel a great sense of buyer remorse because when I use Google's white box I am usually not trying to buy anything. (I must admit to an addiction to freedom seeking and to thinking for myself).

I did not see that I needed a skateboard and even that I could slink it on my shoulder with such dignity and pride, or that I could have bought myself a guitar that one day might be covered with stickers that tell others that I traveled to so many parts of the world. Nor did I realize, until this moment, the joys I could experience via personalized entertainment in a cool white seat,, never mind the fat dewd that always seems to book himself next to me in economy class, that once shattered that kind of dream.

Nor did I ever expect that a press release or a blog could yield so much fodder for thought – if that is I finally decide one day to actually tweet again. I know am aghast at the sheer imagination I am missing that might one day turn I can be all that marketing wished I could be, that epiphany of the idea virus. (Seth Godin calls it viral marketing, but the closest I have previously come to an idea virus is when I noticed the relationship between organic matter collecting in a keyboard).

I must be a fool because that I still love what Google do. I sometimes visit Tumblr and the folks there don't even short-message anymore, they simply leave a signal that indicates what they “liked”. Shame on me that I forget that I am a “You”. I can't recall the last time a rich old women actually said You-Whoo to me. I must really be googling and thinking way, way too much . . .

And then I have audacity to write this. More thinking, more using simple services like Google, Twitter and Disqus to underscore my wretched docile simplicity. What I need is more brochureware, more public relations, more direct marketing, more marketing cliche's – I realize now, I have been utterly, utterly selfish – utterly thoughtless about the crafting and man hours that go into a marketing message.

I am a Google-Narc – there I have said it. I have come out and admitted it. There must be Google-Therapy for this I guess, but I will only find it, if I can find the humility and sacrifice to allow a media service to finally think for me again, to make my digital choices ever so clear to me in a way that I surely have forgotten because I still, and let me use these words sparingly one more time before I awaken myself to the challenge of the one-stop shopping meme … “I still google and use my own mind what it is I google”.

Now leave me alone, such sadness is the new happiness.

[Em]

Just when I thought I had moved on to think about other things I happened to read a Carol Bartz interview in Esquire magazine. It is not that it is thought provoking but I choose to allow it to provoke my thinking :

http://www.esquire.com/women/women-issue/carol-…

I don't mind an in-your-face attitude but if the Internet is as I have been told, a “shared experience”, and if most things become “in your face” then that is way too much “in your face”.

So having invested my time reading this article, it is my way to figure out what it means personally to me. That led to ten things I thought about, not because this is a rebuttal, but a personal reflection to opine my opinion :

1. Industrial Language
The reason for industrial language or foul language isn't because it aids straight talk, it is because we are echoing the environment – only a few people are willing to wash their environment to the point where there is no need to give full voice to frustration and abject realities. Cursing isn't a big deal, actually it can be a whole load of Chris Rock fun, but sustaining or remaining in the same old frickin kind of environment is. We might not get paid to improve our immediate environment but we pay eventually down the road when we don't.

2. Warrior Spirit
Always good to stand up for yourself but the 21st Century shouldn't be a continuation of the gunfight at the OK Corral. More and more people care about what they are doing and anything less than that is time passing entertainment.

3. The Global Gossip Village
Privacy is important and so I also favor discernment. Yet we also do live in a gossip world enabled by technology – a network might be useful with increasing size, but when a network converges to a single point, so does the gossip intensity. If one has to drop kick a leaker of information, first one must drop kick those who serve to enable convergence of the gossipers.

4. Touchpoints and Personal Space
I wholesomely agree that touch is a part of the human condition, but virtual touch are touch points not physical touch. The more touchpoints we generate the more feeling and humanity we extend, the more we control touch, the more touchy life becomes – then touch becomes invasion of one's space – we humans also need space, touch is just one variable of improved humanity.

5. The A-Hole Label
I love Bob Sutton's No-Asshole Rule – but don't assholes also prefer to use more rather than less industrial language – don't they make a point that their worldview is either right or superior. The bug spray for assholes IMHO is awareness of diversity, calling out people who are insensitive in the first place, is simply feeding the very problem Sutton mused in his witty book. One does not make this world any bigger by making people feel smaller and calling out people isn't half as effective I find then seeing something in them that everyone else missed, or that the subscribed or labelled “a-hole” never realized. There is no perfect time for firing people, at least that is only a concern if I am living a clockwork life.

6. The 20th Century Mind
How do we parse stuff? Make sense of all the information on the internet? To those who don't have a life goal that is sure hard. To those who clear about that we live in an age of continuous learning, one's personal use of the internet is a personal decision – that there are people who treat life mechanically, means there is a tremendous market out there to make money out of 20th Century thinkers. If there is one promise to the 21st Century, it is a century that we can learn to think differently. What others do is really none of my business. One does not need to wander all over the internet, but one can wonder if there is intelligent life beyond the human containers of collected followers.

7. Spoon-fed Culture
I don't know what it is people want to know, that they want to know is good enough in my book – I just don't think its smart for any nation in the 21st Century to encourage spoon-fed behaviors. To each their own, I can only think about my own life as I think things through here.

8. Rebel with a Couch
I recognize that the chief reason I am writing this is because I don't like people telling me what to do, what to think or what side of the bed my internet will be on. I am the minority, but every now and then I do become wary of becoming a digital couch potato. That is an easy habit to acquire unless I am prepared to think about my own thinking.

9. That George Orwell Feeling . . .
I don't want HAL in my life, nor BIg Brother watching over me, that is if privacy isn't diluted into a political calculation but remains a right to be exercised, if privacy was a living thing, it would have been put on the endangered species listing a long time ago.

10. “I am not a number I am a free man”
My head falls, my body crumples whenever I hear anyone say that they are the Internet. It was OK when Al Gore was alleged to say something to that refrain but we all do well to learn to learn from mistakes – sure we learn from success but not if the success is a mistake.

[Em]

PS The great thing about thinking is it leaves room for silence. Now I must move on to another Disqus venue…

Yes. It will be interesting to see how this does for Yahoo!. Nothing seems to go their way lately.