We visited on Tuesday afternoon with Yahoo!’s Nick Chavez among violet flowers and floating purple baloons in the bucolic campus of Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale.
Nick is Marketing Director of Corporate Brand Marketing. He is very excited about a competition among some of the brightest young college filmmakers to create ads for Yahoo!. He says that these commercial spots are getting a great deal of traffic and attention. As a next step, Yahoo! is inviting the public to create ads. He says that thousand of Yahoo! visitors have downloaded the script, logo and yes the yodel! Yahoo! is making the yodel for the first time! Download YAHOO_YODEL.aif
Nick told Beet.TV that Yahoo!’s network community of 500 million users can produce great content that is widely popular. He points to the successful partnering of music labels and fans in creating videos of Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ and Jessica Simpson’s video Public Affair (fan version) which just debuted.
Both videos have been at the top of Yahoo! video since they were released. The success of the videos are proof positive that there is enormous power to be tapped. Yes, the consumer is in charge these days and smart companies like Yahoo! are learning to harness that power in very productive ways.
At the end of our chat, we took a stroll around the courtyard of the Yahoo! campus. We love those purple flowers. Nice gardening!
— Andy Plesser and Kate Lyon
BTW: Speaking of online advertising and its viral nature, please read this story in Business Week. Thanks to my buddy Peter Himler of The Flack for pointing this out.
Yahoo!, Consumer Generated Online Advertising, Film Schools, Yodel
