Why Yahoo’s $100 Million Ad Campaign Would Be Better Spent Improving Their PPC Advertising Platform

Yahoo is getting ready to launch an ad campaign costing $100 million:

The new tagline is “It’s You!”—ads feature the Yahoo graphical “Y” and exclamation point in them—as created by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather. The campaign will seek to tie together some new features Yahoo has been adding lately meant to update its image, as more and more users get their content from social nets than portals.

Meanwhile, their pay-per-click search marketing platform leaves a lot to be desired.

• They still don’t have an offline editor, much to the chagrin of search marketers everywhere.
• Yahoo’s Account Optimization “feature” – where they kindly go into advertisers’ accounts uninvited and add keywords and write ads for their campaigns – got them a ton of backlash from the search engine marketing community. The best part? Advertisers have to opt-out, not opt-in to the program.
• Their interface simply looks like crap.

Yahoo’s priorities are in the wrong place. If you were high up at Yahoo, would you focus on imitating as many elements as you could from Adwords — the PPC platform that made Google 97% of its revenue last year (and 99% the year before that) — or would you just say screw it… let’s drop a hundred mil on some billboards.

Yahoo, there’s a reason you’re falling behind… “It’s You!”

UPDATE 9/22:  I think it’s hilarious that during the same week Yahoo announces this $100 million ad campaign, Netflix announces they have awarded their $1 million prize for the contest they announced three years ago that allowed any programmer in the world to take a shot at improving their movie recommendation engine predicting what Netflix customers would like to rent next.

It was a huge success and was 1/100th the cost of Yahoo’s branding push.