Has anyone heard Yahoo!’s new radio spot? (Here’s their release from a few weeks ago)

Its kind of good/ really desparate. I’ve heard some statistics (mostly from ad reps) that radio is the #1 place for URL recall, but more importantly, why am I going to change something that I am perfectly happy with because of a radio spot. Microsoft tried bribing users and that didn’t work, so what makes Yahoo! think this will work.  

As someone who spends quite a bit of their time learning and studying search engines and their results, its interesting to note that Yahoo really does deliver lower quality results in general. It sometimes shows websites that haven’t been updated in months/years and often brings you to sites that are just overloading themselves with keywords, gaming the system. Google is by no means perfect, and I think Yahoo could make itself better if it focused, but for now they seem lost - as their ads imply you will be on Google.

My take on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal remains the same. It was a very good deal for Microsoft, and I believe ultimately would have been a good thing for consumers. Microsoft needs to come up with some new technologies to keep their brand relevant in the long term, and purchasing all of Yahoo’s was an easy way to do that.

What I am afraid of now is a Google/Yahoo relationship. If Yahoo hands Google the reins to the second largest search engine, then what happens? Microsoft online becomes irrelevant (live.com might as well be now), and as a marketer I know have little choice where to spend my search marketing dollars. If Google is controlling Yahoo’s search budget, that essentially makes them irrelevant as well. So now Google essentially controls the entire search market and they can do whatever they want.

I don’t really know what this means, but it doesn’t sound good to me. Now Jerry Yang says Yahoo wants to focus on display ads. Did he forget that Google just completed its integration with DoubleClick and Tim Armstrong wants “to have advertisers load their entire ad budgets into Google’s system, which would allocate spending across media whether online or offline.” Judging by how well Google has dominated the search market and stolen millions of users from yahoo.com to gmail.com, I would be concerned if I was Yahoo.

Google already controls enough of the internet, and if they control Yahoo’s search advertising they will essentially be drinking Yahoo’s milkshake.