On the fifth floor of 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Yahoo’s UK headquarters there are three huge poster stands: one advertising its shopping arm, Kelkoo, another advertising the search engine itself and inbetween is an ad for its business-to-business service: Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing). The creative shows a man’s face looking excitable to the point of explosion popping out of one corner with the copy, ‘A sudden rush of customers to my head’ taking up the rest of the space.
Of the three, it is the best execution and given its central position flanked between Kelkoo and Yahoo Search you get the sense that it’s as celebrated as the trendier music and video offerings.
Don’t get me wrong Yahoo’s HQ is by no means dull. A huge plasma screen plays Yahoo music videos and there’s an arm-deep bowl of jelly babies on the receptionist’s desk, though no sign of lava lamps, electric scooters or giant coloured balls the much discussed decor of its main counterpart. Those passing through the reception are grown-up (mid-to-late 30s) versions of the dotcom boomers T-shirts and jeans have given way to something a little smarter and where they might not have worn glasses five years ago, glasses are now ubiquitous. Perhaps a telltale sign, albeit the only one, of many, many late nights in the bad years.
Karen Wilson, European marketing director for Yahoo Search Marketing, fits the bill. Working for Internet-related businesses since 1995, she’s been through the boom, the bust and come out the other side wearing Prada glasses. Stirred but not shaken.
Her background is typical of many early Internet careerists: utterly bizarre. After graduating with a degree in textile design she had a choice between undertaking a post-graduate in aeronautical design and applying for a job. She chose the latter, joined events organisers First Conferences in 1995 and within a year had put on the precursor to Internet World. The incongruity of it strikes her now, I knew nothing about computers. A typing course the previous summer was the extent of my knowledge. We just fell into this emerging market the Internet.
Whatever the technology shortcomings, they put on a good show. Exhibitors included the full spectrum of future Internet players: Cisco Systems, Microsoft, IBM, Genesis, Yahoo and the banks (crucially the banks). Wilson comments, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch were very involved all of a sudden it was an investor’s market. The line-up of speakers was equally impressive: Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Jerry Yang the founder of Yahoo and Omid Yar, founder of Ebay.
Their enthusiasm was infectious and Wilson was quickly converted. I could see the possibility, particularly when you listened to the founders and the leaders of these companies speak. Back then everyone was talking about the Internet’s boundless opportunities and the occasional whimper about hacking and security did little to dampen anyone’s spirits.
Talk is cheap though. Real commitment was measured with cash and there was also plenty of that. In 1999 Wilson joined technology investment dotcom Tornado Insider. Brought in as worldwide marketing & events manager, Wilson was charged with organising a launch event that would ultimately facilitate mass investment in Internet businesses. The venue was Disneyland Paris, there were 1200 attendees roughly split between investors and entrepreneurs and the theme was ‘spend as much as you can’.
Wilson remembers the elevator pitches when the entrepreneurs had 30 seconds to sell their latest hi-tech idea, and the surreal images: We took people on the rides and we could hear them talking about how many millions they were investing mid-rollercoaster.
However, every rollercoaster that goes up must come down and Wilson sensed a descent. At Tornado I was starting to feel that the big high was coming to an end. We knew that this really couldn’t continue. The paper value of so many businesses was hundreds of millions, but in reality they had a much more reasonable value.
The exuberance at the end of the century was replaced by a wish for stability and reality in the new; and so Wilson swapped Tornado’s Disneyland for ISP Globix’s storage servers in 2000. Her job was to market the server space to large corporates who needed somewhere to host their websites and while year-one went well; year-two was a different story.
In 2001 I felt the dotcom burst as Globix was burned. Large corporates started to rethink their Internet strategy. They started to question whether they really needed to buy all of this storage space.
The ISP business really took a dive to the point that Globix made a lot of people redundant in 2002. It was the same for other ISPs Cable & Wireless, Exodus etc.
Wilson was made redundant.
Scepticism followed her redundancy but it was short-lived, catalysed by the dawn of the sponsored search. It was early 2002 and her initial reaction was ‘great tool’ particularly in a B2B environment. Traditional direct mail was laborious and expensive still effective, don’t get me wrong; but the cost-differential of sponsored search and the fact that it was performance-based just made it really exciting. When American sponsored search company Overture offered her a job as UK marketing manager, she couldn’t refuse. Having been burned through Globix and experiencing the whole of that space collapse I did my due diligence, but the reality was that this was one of the fastest growing areas and as a marketer I know it’s geeky but it’s a really exciting development. The short of it is that she couldn’t resist.
Probably a good thing. Today she’s European marketing director of Yahoo Search Marketing Overture was bought by US search engine Yahoo in October 2003 and it has just rebranded. To give it more of a hyperbolic twist, she’s working for the company that could most threaten Google; but more of that later.
Wilson’s role is to acquire new sponsored search customers across Europe and retain existing ones. She admits that there’s huge growth in the sponsored search market (more businesses are going online, typically offline businesses are realising online potential) but is not tempted to rest on Yahoo’s laurels: We can’t afford to sit back, particularly now when there’s increasing competition the customer can go anywhere.
Losing a customer to Google or any other search engine is anathema to Wilson. As such, retention is a huge, challenging issue. It’s such a new environment there’s no history of how to acquire a sponsored search customer or how you grow one when you’ve got it.
Add to this the fact that she’s trying to attract and retain customers from over 12 European markets, customers whose level of search knowledge/awareness floats from the deep to the shallow end. There are companies from the early adopting sectors travel, finance and IT who are very web-savvy, have a site that is fully optimised and have integrated marketing campaigns on and offline. How Wilson and her team communicate with them will vary drastically from how she deals with those at the other end of the spectrum. It could be a small business, say a manufacturing business that has been selling out of a store-front for many years and has suddenly got a website no more than a catalogue but is getting people looking at it and doesn’t know any more than that.
Marketing across Europe also brings its own quirks. The Germans, Wilson tells me, like to talk. She’s also found that DM gets great cut-through in the German market probably down to tighter protection laws but it wouldn’t be her preference in the UK. Here she’d start a campaign with a sponsored search.
A lot of her marketing is online. Telesales is also used, presumably more so in Germany, and the rest of the emphasis is placed on face-to-face. A glimpse at her calendar reveals days at Search Engine Strategies, Internet World, AdTech and many others, but it’s the close contact with businesses available via Chamber of Commerce, IAB and Business Link seminars and conferences, that she favours. Part of their role is to educate members on emerging technologies for business and we find that working in partnership is a very effective way to talk to businesses that are interested.
This also helps put a face to the sometimes faceless search engines. Wilson admits that you could be a new sponsored search customer, sign up online, have a problem-free experience and never speak to anyone. This is not how she intends to expand the business. In 2004 CRM became key how do we keep the customer? How do we ensure that we’re providing the service that they really want? How do we make it easy for them to use? How do we ensure that their business develops and grows alongside us? Customer feedback is filtered through to the product development teams and transformed into products such as enhanced marketing technology, local search products and other developments in search marketing.
This is one of the key areas where Wilson feels the integration with Yahoo will be fruitful to advertisers and partners alike. Overture, on its own, would have struggled to deliver in such a ruthless market. With one of the biggest search engines in the world it stands in good stead. This isn’t just on a technology front; it’s also crucial in the silent brand war. Yahoo is a great brand name not just in a consumer environment but also in B2B, particularly in advertising.
The rebrand activity has just started and will run until the end of April, but already Wilson is looking forward. We’re really working on the post-transitional campaign. How we incorporate Yahoo into the proposition that’s what’s key. We want to educate the market on what we can offer and the brand can really support that.
While some commentators are tipping Yahoo as the search engine to watch out for, the one poised to take the future of search from Google, Wilson is stoic, For the marketplace you need to have good competition and Google clearly provides that. Though it will be interesting to see who gets to the next stage first. She’s not interested in knocking the competition, nor is she envious of Google’s relentless media attention: It gets a lot of press coverage because it’s a much newer brand. Yahoo is the grown-up in the business it’s the veteran but still at the cutting edge. It’s been through the initial boom, survived the bust and come out the other side.
A kindred tale of survivors an unlikely one, in an unlikely environment, but a survivor story all the same. Watch out for the movie.
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