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Industry Trends

Internet Search Giant Resorts To Radio For Self-Promotion

By March 28, 2008July 30th, 20234 Comments

Yahoo! Is trying every trick in the book (and out of it) to improve its performance. WebProNews reports that Yahoo!’s latest campaign involves a number of ads on local radio stations.

These ads were planned in last December and Yahoo! said the campaign has nothing to do with the Microsoft offer, which came only in February 2008. The campaign was kicked off in the last week of March in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Advertising Yahoo! search on the radio in a bid to entice customers away from Google sounds like clutching at straw. The ads highlight product features that Google does not have and claim that their product is easier to use and more effective. But radio is certainly no longer considered to be a state of the art technology, and does not command as large an audience of listeners as it used to. The first question that then springs to mind is why is Yahoo! using the wrong medium and the wrong message to reach the wrong sort of audience?
“Search engines like Google get you lost in all the links, but not Yahoo! Search.” says one of the ads in circulation. They then mention that Yahoo! has drop-down menus with related suggestions and then proceed to say that “You won’t find that on your Google page.”

Strangely enough, SearchEngineLand reports that Google Search Suggest might become a default feature on the Google.com search box, just like it is on the Google toolbar and in some localised versions of Google.

Raj Gossain V.P. of marketing at Yahoo! Search explains that the radio ads are just a means to inform people who have not used Yahoo! Search for a while, that they now have the option of a better and easier to use product available to them. How ethical it is to actually run down a competitor to sell your product remains debatable.