Your money up in smoke (Yahoo! shareholder)

The new $100 million Yahoo! ad campaign has made it’s way to Manhattans bus stops and NYC taxi cab roofs. Under the best of circumstances it’s hard to imagine that an ad campaign – or the lack thereof – is what ails Yahoo!. One hundred million dollars is a lot of money and I’m sure I’m not the only CEO of a startup saying to himself “the things I would do if I had that money instead”.

It’s easy to criticize the decisions of others from the outside so I’ll give Bartz the benefit of the doubt and assume that relative to all of the other ways she could have spent the money – be it on innovation on existing products, creating new products, creating bonuses for innovation among employees, buying new products that Yahoo! could leverage it’s massive brand and distribution over – this was the most appealing.

That Monday morning quarterback disclaimer out of the way, spending money on ads is one of the easiest ways there is to spend money if you are a big company with – for now – cash in the bank. Innovation is a slow process under the best of circumstances and these are not the best of days at Yahoo! But pulling out your checkbook to buy masses of media for quickly created ads only involves the stroke of a pen or the email to the treasurer to send the wire. It’s fast and it’s easy. Effective? Well, that depends if the product is any good. And with the exception of certain Yahoo! verticals like finance, the product has stagnated and is getting worse not better.

Caveats aside, I don’t need to know what Bartz does to know that this is a confusing and bad ad campaign. What on earth does it mean that the Internet is mine?

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