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Karen Edwards, Yahoo!'s director of brand management, admits her job has spoiled her. If not for the online search service with the quirky name, the 34-year-old Edwards may still be cooking on a conventional stove and settling for dinner at any old Mexican restaurant in Silicon Valley.
It was a bulletin board message on Yahoo! that united Edwards with her 1920s Wedgewood stove. Another clued her in about Palo Alto Sol, a dingy Mexican joint with killer fajitas.
Because of Edwards, Brandweek's Marketer of the Year for the emerging Internet media industry, millions of first-time Netizens can tell similar stories of online exploration, discovery and conquest.
Edwards and her eclectic team of marketers introduced the American couch potato to Yahoo!, a destination that links Web surfers to countless bits of information. In the process, the first pure consumer Internet brand was born, and an advertising-based business model was validated when marketers responded by pouring millions into advertising on Yahoo!
Because Yahoo! is one of only a few online destinations that can guarantee an advertiser the reach of a mass medium, it has quickly garnered the status of a must-buy for those mulling online media as part of the marketing mix. Advertising dollars account for nearly all of Yahoo!'s 1997 second-quarter revenues of $13.5 million, a figure that has been projected by analysts at Robertson, Stephens of San Francisco to rise to $16.2 million in the third-quarter.
Analysts continue to marvel at the sheer genius of Yahoo!'s commercial launch last year, a scarce two years after the online navigation guide came to life when Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and Dave Filo conceived the idea of a search engine and had it hosted on the university's server.
Edwards identified that revenue growth and, ultimately, survival in the uncharted waters of the Internet meant targeting the near-surfers, or the legions of potential Web recruits. So in April 1996, Edwards teamed with San Francisco advertising agency Black Rocket on a national advertising campaign-a first for the so-called Web-endemic brands-that used traditional media to introduce Yahoo! to the masses.
The result was a brilliantly executed campaign and the foundation for the company's success. Traffic increased more than four-fold en route to generating revenue of nearly $34 million...