My Yahoo Makes Me Want to Dance with a Feather Boa – Not!
April 12, 2009 · Print This Article
I saw this ad on the home page of Yahoo! today, and it struck me as funny.
I know it’s not meant to be funny, but here is what I thought when I saw this ad.
“My Yahoo! The stuff you want, how you want it with a feather boa.”
It reminds me of that joke people often play while reading fortune cookies where you add the phrase “between the sheets” after you read the fortune, but I digress.
My point is that I know how hard it is to choose a photo to go with an ad or marketing piece. I’ve sat through the dozens of meetings while everyone and their brother weighs in on the photos that could be used for the final piece. I know how challenging it is to get the right picture when all the players in a large company want to have their say. However, I can’t connect that frolicking woman with the feather boa with the apparent joy that My Yahoo! brings. It’s a bit too tea party or Ginger Grant for me.
Just goes to show that too many cooks spoil the ad photo decision process.
You forgot the thrill of wearing antennae! I want in on this action and have always wanted to wear a feather boa. I agree though, very poor choice of photo. Even I could’ve done better and I’ve never worked in marketing.
This is the classic case of “marketing by committee”, “creative by committee”, “design by committee” — whichever phrase you want to use fits. It’s the scenario all marketers (particularly in large companies) have to live through, and it always makes the final result become a watered down, less effective version of the original concept.
[...] Just yesterday, I published a post about Yahoo!’s online ad for My Yahoo! that clearly demonstrated the painful “design by committee” process (see the post – My Yahoo Make Me Want to Wear a Feather Boa- Not!. [...]