I don’t get it.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s not brilliant. I mean, in 1996, I told my fellow senior managers at Wired that the world didn’t need another search engine (we started Hotbot anyway and I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason Lycos bout HotWired).
From GigaOm’s coverage of Yahoo’s media day:
Throughout presentations from the Yahoo Media Group, a part of the new “Audience” division, the key word, uttered more times than we could count, was “promotions.” And so, in both overt and subtle fashion, Yahoo is a company transitioning itself into what’s essentially a marketing platform…..
The most obvious example of Yahoo’s increasing bent towards marketing is its new “Brand Universe” initiative, announced in November. The company will tie together its disjointed properties — such as search, groups, Flickr, Answers, avatars — to lead back to pages about a certain pop culture topic — for instance, Nintendo’s Wii.
..Yahoo says it will launch 100 such pages by year’s end; next up are the Sims, Halo, Lost, the Office, Transformers, and Harry Potter.
It feels off in some way, but exactly how has not struck me yet. Also, the new person who comes in to run the Audience group – a person not yet hired – might not like this idea. Then again, there is something to it that strikes me as an accurate read of today’s culture – brands are the new water coolers. Hmmm.
The Yahoo Wii page. More coming soon….