Saturday, May 8, 2010

New Yahoo! Ad Slams Google for Being Too Bare

Yahoo!'s latest ad criticizes Google for driving users away with its minimalist and bare homepage.

Yahoo! has definitely come up with a clever way to differentiate itself from the competition and the, "You go there to leave" line is very strong. However, Google has always prided itself on being minimalist and only allowing bare essentials onto its homepage. The company even has a limit on how many words can appear there. Yahoo! is the opposite, preferring to brand itself as a portal. Google could just as easily fire back that Yahoo! is far too crowded and distracts users from what they're there to do.! is launching a new, $85 million ad campaign based around the company's still relatively new 'It's You' slogan. The Wall Street Journal carries the first commercial from this campaign and Yahoo! certainly isn't taking any prisoners; this one targets Google and the fact that "you come to this place so you can leave."
The voiceover for the commercial explains a theory people supposedly have about homepages. This theory is that the homepage should get you where you want to go and there should be nothing more to look at than a box and a button.