Commercial Success

It was one thing to attract advertisers for products that people routinely research on the Web: movie tickets, financial services, electronics, and cars. (J.D. Power reports that nearly 64% of new-car buyers do some research first on the Web.) A harder challenge was selling Yahoo to packaged-goods giants such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Kimberly-Clark, which make things that people don't study or buy online, such as soap and toothpaste. Those companies challenged Yahoo's salespeople to prove that online advertising actually results in offline sales. And Yahoo came up with an ingenious approach. It teamed with AC Nielsen's Homescan, which has participants in 66,000 households who scan the bar codes of every item they bring home from supermarkets and grocery stores. Yahoo recruited 22,000 of those homes -- the ones that are also Yahoo users -- for its own study. Now Unilever can advertise a product on Yahoo and then see exactly how many Yahoo users went out and bought that brand. That's what the industry needed to become converts.

The VPs of marketing and their account executives and media planners at ad agencies aren't the only people Millard has been wooing. She also promotes online advertising to creative directors at the agencies. When she joined Yahoo in 2001, "Wenda and I shared a belief that online creative sucked," says Jerry Shereshewsky, her closest colleague, a veteran adman Millard appointed as Yahoo's Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Madison Avenue.

Shereshewsky wanted to improve the quality by sponsoring awards for outstanding creative work in the new medium. Silicon Valley already had its own awards show, the Webbys. But that didn't mesh with Millard's philosophy that interactive has to be part of the establishment rather than apart from it. So they approached the existing ad awards programs -- the Clios, among others -- and got them to introduce new awards for interactive. The winners receive replicas of the oversized purple armchair from the lobby of Yahoo's California headquarters, the Yahoo Big Idea Chair. The chairs have already become prestige items to have on display at ad agency offices.

Yahoo also began hosting educational "summits," where creatives could share ideas about innovative practices. The confabs attract attendees such as Woody Woodruff, the creative director at Marsteller. "I've been doing advertising for 30 years," he says. "The Internet is not something you instinctively know how to use. Yahoo's creative summits tell us what can be done. These seminars and awards shows are responsible for getting people interested in online advertising. They won't tell you to advertise on Yahoo. They hardly even mention Yahoo. But if you think, 'Gee, we've got to do something special,' you think of Yahoo first, because they're the ones who've been proselytizing the medium." Woodruff wound up turning to Yahoo for technical help with an interactive campaign to promote the new $20 bill. The ads won his agency a Yahoo Big Idea Chair.

At the most recent summit, in Manhattan in October, Millard and Shereshewsky brought in creative teams to show off four campaigns that had incorporated online advertising in innovative ways. To promote Axe, a deodorant body spray for teenage boys and young men, Unilever produced two comical mock home movies showing women who just couldn't keep their hands off men who used the product. The films attracted 1.7 million visitors to Axe's Web site in three and a half months.

The summit continued with a presentation about an American Express campaign that created two "Webisodes" -- five-minute films that debuted on the Web -- starring Jerry Seinfeld and his buddy Superman. A roadblock of Yahoo's front page brought several hundred thousand people to AmEx's Web site within 24 hours to view the films. More than 3 million visitors came to the site in two months. By offering an easy tool for people to send emails to friends telling them about the films, AmEx captured the names and email addresses of 250,000 people -- five times as many as it had hoped to get.

The AmEx campaign was impressive, but the 165 audience members at the Yahoo summit voted to award the Big Idea Chair to Audi for its David Bowie contest. Audi's Web site let visitors take any two of their favorite Bowie songs and "mash" them together to create a new song. Then the fans voted for the finalists and Bowie himself picked the winner. Once people came to the site, Audi tracked thousands who configured designs for its cars, sent them to local dealers, and followed through with car purchases, resulting in a 1,032% return on investment for the campaign.