VP and global head of B2B marketing for the media and adtech business shares the first year program of work to restore the brand and reset the business under private equity ownership
Yahoo VP and global head of B2B marketing, Jen Whelan, is the first to admit a double take when she found out Verizon Media was going to rebrand back to Yahoo.
Having joined the Verizon Media business after the failed attempt to rebrand to Oath, Whelan didn’t carry the same baggage longer serving employees were wheeling about as the organisation looked to rebrand after shifting to private equity ownership in 2021. But she was aware getting employees, customers and the market enthused about bringing the Yahoo moniker back was a challenging task, nonetheless.
“I had started at Verizon and I believed in that brand. But Yahoo from the 1990s? I felt myself asking that question,” Whelan tells CMO. “I had to go through that process of stripping the name away and looking at the assets. And the assets are big. We have 900 million people coming every month to our digital offerings. We have all these DSPs and adtech that has been consolidated into a best-of-the-best offering we spent eight years refining.
“I knew as a marketer I had all the meat, yet the name would be something I would have to get customers to support.”
In tackling the rebrand challenge, significant customer consultation and research was therefore vital.
“We talked to customers and asked: Will it freak you out if we call ourselves Yahoo again? They said no, they got it,” Whelan says. “What they did do though, is ask us two tough questions: Are you still going to have the same products; and are you going to continue to innovate and bring in new things? They said if you’re just going to ride it out, they didn’t want to be a part of that.
“We explained what Apollo saw in us and the growth ambition, showed how much we had grown over the last three quarters, and they got on-board. I figured if customers can get on-board with Yahoo, then I can get on-board with Yahoo. What a great challenge as a marketer.”
It’s been a bumpy road back to the future for Yahoo as an organisation. One of the darlings of the original Web, Yahoo was acquired alongside AOL by US-based telco giant, Verizon, in 2016, and put together as part of a united media and adtech business. From there, the carrier set out on a mission to unify and rebrand these properties as one global offering. The resulting umbrella entity, Oath, was officially unveiled in June 2017 at Cannes.
Just 18 months later, the group ditched the highly criticised Oath name, rebranding under the more straightforward moniker, Verizon Media Business, in January 2019. As this was occurring globally, the A/NZ team worked through bringing the Yahoo7 joint venture business between the parent company and Seven West Media into the fully owned fold.
And then private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, swooped in, picking up 90 per cent of the business from Verizon in a deal worth US$5 billion. The deal was completed in September 2021 and triggered the company rebrand back to Yahoo. Today, Yahoo incorporates all Yahoo-branded digital properties, TechCrunch, AOL, Engadget, interactive media brand, Yahoo Creative Studios (formerly RYOT) and a digital advertising platform. It’s reportedly the third-largest Internet property globally.
In talking through the good, bad and ugly of the brand task, Whelan points to Yahoo’s heritage and awareness as positives.
“There is so much fun in retro and what’s old is new again,” Whelan comments. “The APAC team said to me this week people are now talking about Web 3.0, but you’re the only ones that were there for Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. It’s a bit of turning old into new.”
Employee buy-in was, however, an early challenge, and Whelan admits numerous people on the team weren’t exactly revved up about it.
“There was no appetite for a new name – the pain of going through Oath and the millions it took was still there,” Whelan says. “Getting the employees mentally OK with the rebrand and ensuring they knew this wasn’t the little boy that cried wolf was key. I knew we had to get past that legacy and let that go as we were all on the one team together.
“We had this beautiful asset in Yahoo, and sure, there were challenges. But it was so much better than starting from zero. We had to make it clear we were going to stick with this, this is who we are, we’re going back to our roots and we’re not going to change our name again.”
Helping this process has been seeing it come to life in market, Whelan says. One of the most visceral examples is Yahoo’s experiential activities and purple flair at the Cannes festival in June 2022.
“Seeing Yahoo come to life in that physical space – I can’t imagine any other brand doing what we did,” she says. “The way the beach came to life, and our penthouse for more formal meetings, down to the catering – it felt so on brand. I couldn’t envision any other manifestation of who we are but the purple, teal, beachy chairs, pillows and that setting. It felt like we were in our own skin.”
A further help has been Apollo’s expectations of the Yahoo business. For Whelan, these made it clear a longer-term and thoughtful approach to rebuilding the brand and delivering sustainable results was supported over the quarterly imperatives of a listed company. A new CEO, Jim Lanzone, also came in with the support of Apollo and clear authority to craft a new-look Yahoo business.
“Jim brought in great new leaders and is very personable… And he has really changed the employee mindset,” Whelan says. “We don’t have to solve all the world’s problems this quarter. It’s going to take us a couple of years to get all of the things done we want to get done and that’s ok. Being privately owned is so amazing for that. Our goal is a couple of years ago and we’re marching towards that big goal.”
As to the growth levers at Yahoo’s disposal, the number one for Whelan from a brand perspective is customer experience centred on trust.
“We knew in talking to our top customers that in our competitive set, they wanted us to win. They told us they have to work with some of our competitors because of reach. But it’s like calling and getting the automated IVR. When they call us, a human being picks up. Our customer service is seen as white glove. That made us a trusted partner,” she explains. “The first brand thing we did was work that into our positioning.
“We went to a customer advisory council of our top 40 customers in the US, showed them all the research, customer and employee quotes and then our two brand options. They were surprised I wasn’t showing them the finished product. But I wanted that customer advisory input and feedback. ‘Truly connected’ was received well and customers said they believed only we could use that phrase. It felt authentic to Yahoo.”
Whelan says her team “let that sit for about six months, then focused on the double-click on how to bring it to life”. Again, dialogue with customers led to an emphasis on people, partnerships and performance in Yahoo’s marketing strategy.
“We can be the nicest partner on the planet, but if we don’t perform, show the numbers and a client’s campaigns are not delivering, then sorry but we can’t be friends,” Whelan says. “We were also told we lead from a people perspective; we had great partnerships in the industry and we delivered. So we called it the 3Ps and started building positioning statement, how it comes to life, then started building campaigns underneath that.”
From a product perspective, Yahoo’s DSP is a cornerstone for growth. Bringing this to life requires great customer case studies focused on their success, Whelan continues. Identity and the demise of third-party cookies is another opportunity for Yahoo to engage with its identity and next-generation contextual solutions.
Addressable TV, or connected TV (CTV) is growing like wildfire and Yahoo also has its sights on that space, with Whelan noting APAC quarter-over-quarter growth "is huge".
"Omnichannel, and those different channels and form factors is an important area for us to focus on. In our DSP you can have an audio solution, OOH, CTV. I don’t think we have fully maxxed out talking to people about the power of using a tool like that," she says.
Of course, explaining adtech and how modern digital advertising works is another matter. Having built her career as a non-technical marketer in highly technical organisations such as Qualcomm, Intel and Criteo, Whelan is well aware many CMOs will struggle to understand the complexities of the modern advertising ecosystem and supply chain.
“We have to constantly remind ourselves here to talk to CMOs in non-technical language,” she says. “With first-party data and identity, things are quite complex – how the DSP works is very complex… So we talk about growing their business, using normal language to do it. It’s a good challenge to have with the first-party data situation right now.”
One recent co-marketing program Whelan is most proud of for achieving this is Yahoo’s work with Marriott. The company has been brought in to deliver foundations for the hotel group’s own media network and offering.
“It’s an amazing case study and there is exclusivity there. But I’ll be honest, it took a while for me to understand it,” Whelan says. “We needed to really break it down to make it clear how this was going to bring revenue to the Marriott business.
“Think about all the screens in Marriott hotels, plus the website, in elevators, in the gyms: Marriott wants to use those screens to not only show content relevant in the hotel, but also for advertising. The hotel chain is exclusively using us for that supply management. They don’t want to fill their 170,000 screens, they have asked us to do that. Our advertisers wanting to reach Marriott audiences are accessing a whole new audience. It’s that simple, but it wasn’t talked about that simply for a long time.
“In order to make all this come to life, you have to really think about the customer from a B2B perspective, then show someone like a Marriott the money on the table for them. As a Marriott customer, I also want them to protect me and not be trapped in an elevator with ad after ad. There has to be a balance there. And that’s where you get into contextual relevancy – what if the ads were about flipflops or great swimwear and was relevant to my Marriott experience? Then you’re starting to talk about the holy grail.”
As she moves into year two of Yahoo’s brand and marketing plan, letting customers tell the story is so important, the business has set one of its OKRs internally around achieving this.
“I want to empower our customers. I want us to think about how we help them earn more money. Our revenue growth should be secondary – it’s the effect of genuinely and truly thinking about the customer. That’s where I think there’s a sweet spot,” Whelan adds.
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