Search News: An Open Letter to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz – Congrats, We’re So Sorry!
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 14, 2009 | Share This
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Hi Carol! So, you’ve decided to take the top spot at Yahoo. You have a reputation for being hard-nosed and tough – two qualities that will serve you well at the head of the struggling web giant. You’ve had the experience at Autodesk of steering the software company through some tough channels, ultimately leading them to a market-leading position.
On the other hand there are the key pillars that underpin Yahoo’s successes and failures: search engines, media, and advertising. All of which are conspicuously absent on your resume. This gives us some pause but you seem pretty smart and your blood rival – Google’s Eric Schmidt – once worked with you at Sun Microsystems so it’s not impossible to figure this stuff out.
Thankfully folks like us and every other search blog and commenter in the Webisphere stand ready to give you reams of free, unsolicited advice. Excited yet? You will be when you see our five suggestions to get Yahoo moving again.
1) For crying out loud, stop messing with people’s campaigns! This may seem like a minor thing but it has the potential to snowball into a real locust storm. I’m talking plague of lawyers stuff here. We already dedicated a post to the problem of Yahoo altering ad copy and even bids for campaigns that are not placed via insertion order so I’m not going to rehash all the finer points. All you need to know is that it has to stop.
2) Vive le Difference! That’s Frenchie talk for celebrating what sets Yahoo apart from your competitors. You aren’t Google – stop trying to be. What Yahoo does well is to have a great integrated sponsorship platform that extends across a lot of different types of platforms. Maximize this properly and you could be the poster child for offline/online marketing integration.
3) Have you thought about a 3 way? A 3 way split-up of course, what did you think I meant? Take the Ad network and content sites including Yahoo Finance and smoosh them up with AOL’s relatively successful content properties. Then take the search biz and hitch it to Microsoft’s Live Search. AOL has already helpfully split their content entities up into the Mediaglow group for easy remixing. Just think about it.
4) Make it Easy for advertisers to spend money. We want to spend dollars with you, we really do. But when Google has this nice, easy to use AdWords Editor that allows us to make search advertising campaign alterations quickly and easily… Take a good look at AdWords editor if you are determined to stay in the search engine biz, and copy the hell out of it. While you’re at it – let me miss-spell my keywords. People may in fact be searching “wrong’, why can’t I market to them successfully?
5) Go radically, irrevocably, insanely open source. People want transparency into search algorithms and metrics. Give it to them- and then some. Yahoo already took a promising first step with BOSS (Build Your own Search Service) and then promptly back-burnered it. Allow your users to design the search interface and even the algorithm they want easily. Allow advertisers to see all your data – on users, bids, everything! Let them create as customized a search campaign as imaginable. Will people try to game the system? Of course they will - but just like Wikipedia (usually), users will corral the bad actors and enforce best practices.
Well, we have to go now. Hopefully you’ve found this to be a useful set of options to mull over. If you have any questions or you want to write us back there is always our comments section, or hit me up on Twitter at @nmallin.
Good luck!
Your Pals at SearchViews
Topics: Advertising: Online, ECommerce, SEM: Paid Search, Yahoo! |
Just sell yahoo.com no more problems!!