Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

The Color Purple: Yahoo Tries to Excite Consumers With Month-Long New Logo Reveal

In yet another flashy PR effort under Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, the company’s marketing arm has ginned up an effort to get consumers talking about a new logo it plans on launching in a month and had previously signaled that it was working on. While it has apparently already selected a new design, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is going to keep us cooling our heels, and will be showing off 30 different logos. There will then be a big Sept. 4 reveal under an effort called, of course, “30 Days of Change.”

The first possible — which looks kind of skinny to me — is above.

The move is being led by marketing chief Kathy Savitt, who has had sentiment studies done on the logo over the last year. Interestingly, according to sources who have seen the results, consumers actually like the existing logo, so there have only been some minor tweaks made to it recently, such as making the distinctive Yahoo purple slightly darker.

Apparently, that was not enough for Savitt.

Yahoo has actually changed its logo twice since it was founded in the mid-1990s, but not in a dog’s age. While the anticipation is not quite like waiting to see what happened in the recent season finale of “Game of Thrones” — will it be fuchsia or will it be violet or will it be purple is not quite the same as the Red Wedding — we’ll try our best to get all psyched.

(By the way, I have an even better marketing idea: Yahoo, which has been on a startup-buying spree of late, ratchets it up to buying a company a day for 30 days, and then at the end it would reveal the business strategery for them all!)

Moving along — until Logo-palooza is finally here, I am definitely going to need a very big dose of Carly Simon:

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work