Marissa Mayer Steers Yahoo! Through the High C's

by Sheila Shayon


Big moves are afoot at Yahoo!, where new CEO Marissa Mayer this week outlined her strategy for a new era at the company she joined from Google in July. In an all-hands meeting Tuesday at the company’s Sunnyvale, California headquarters, Mayer outlined her vision for personalizing the Web for users, from content to email to ads, while expanding that user base, talent pool (witness her new CFO hire, "Silicon Valley legend" Ken Goldman) and advertiser partners. 
Articulating her vision of "four C's" (Culture, Company goals, Calibration and Compensation), Mayer wants Yahoo! "to become something users touch every day," according to Business Insider, and to achieve that, the company must move more quickly, with employees having more ownership over and resources for their projects which will be approved only if they have the potential to scale to 100 million users or $100 million in revenue. As AllThingsD detailed, Mayer also spoke of more "acqui-hires," buying small companies for tech talent rather than products, and emphasized mobile as an area where Yahoo! "will be strong" by 2015.
While the company remains one of the world's most popular websites with more than 700 million monthly users of its email service and readers of its news pages, stiff competition from Facebook and Google and diminished online display ad prices have led to stagnated revenue. Dominance in the billion dollar industry of contextually relevant ads is up for grabs and Yahoo! is staking its claim. To that end, Yahoo! and Media.net just announced a long-term agreement to launch Yahoo! Bing Network Contextual Ads to provide web publishers with customized ad units that display relevant text ads from across the Yahoo! Bing Network.
While Yahoo! has had a partnership with Microsoft the MS Search Alliance since 2009, the Media.net collaboration adds a publisher side solution enabling Yahoo! access to third party publishers and any publisher to access Yahoo! Bing Network ads. Media.net will manage technology, business operations and global publisher relationships with Yahoo! handling the same for advertisers and worldwide sales, plus all aspects of network operations to adhere to existing quality traffic standards.
On the design front, TechCrunch obtained a leaked copy of a likely mockup for the new Yahoo home page. “The new home page features links for key areas that Yahoo plans to double-down on, including Search, Mobile, and Social. It also has links to the reported 4 C’s that are part of Mayer’s goals for talent at Yahoo…Note also that Yahoo [as Mayer previously announced] is dropping the ® symbol from their logo...but, not the ‘!’ symbol.”
Reactions to Tuesday’s presentation varied. "Marissa Mayer did what she had to do in articulating the broad directions of a fresh strategy for Yahoo that is focused, understandable, appears to leverage the most important industry trends, and gives employees and stakeholders a reason to be optimistic," commented Hadley Reynolds, an analyst with NextEra Research. "None of these things had been apparent prior to her arrival."
Analyst Patrick Moorhead, however, said "On the surface, what Mayer is describing is what a 1,000 Internet companies could describe. What will be vitally important is how Yahoo differentiates what they do in mobile ... and that's possible but not probable. They are a decade behind Google and Facebook. Very rarely does a company come behind after sitting out so long to become the leader."
“In summary, culture + company + calibration + compensation – consensus = a daily mobile routine of personalized core competencies increasing users’ usage of talent-built, advertising-driven products. It’s almost too simple," Wired commented. "Sarcasm aside, it’s early yet in Mayer’s reign, and all we really know about her thinking thus far is from second- and third-hand reports. It’s possible she has a clear plan for how to turn around Yahoo. What she doesn’t have is a plan that’s clear to the world outside Yahoo."

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