Yahoo Bleeds Purple. And You Thought Microsoft’s Marketing Campaign Was Weird
pparently Yahoo has caught the bizarre marketing bug. Today the company has launched “Start Wearing Purple”, a campaign that is trying to capitalize on the color’s reported association with “innovation and imagination” (I always thought it was tied to royalty). Purple has long been Yahoo’s official color, though the logo displayed on its homepage is now a striking red.
The campaign is centered around the web portal Start Wearing Purple, which includes features like “Purple Picks”- a daily series of links to things which the Yahoo team has deemed Purple-worthy. There’s also a special Flickr Account celebrating all things purple. And over at Purple Pranks, you can watch a few bizarre setups led by Improv Everywhere’s Charlie Todd. Highlights include an elevator full of people singing a song about their favorite color whenever a stranger walks in.
The coolest component of the campaign is Purple Bikes. Yahoo has outfitted a fleet of 20 purple bicycles with solar powered cameras, GPS, and mobile Internet connectivity, which are now making their way across a dozen cities around the globe. The bikes will be taking (and automatically tagging) snapshots every sixty seconds, which chronicle each traveler’s journey on a special Flickr map. You can read more about the Purple Bikes over at CrunchGear.
So is Start Wearing Purple a total bust? Major corporations launch marketing campaigns like this all the time in order to increase brand awareness and show their users that they have a soul. And as far as these campaigns go, Yahoo seems to have done a good job - the improv videos are funny, the bikes are cool, and the site is fun to play around with. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the marketing dollars could be better spent convincing me to actually use Yahoo once in a while.
I have a Motorola Razr. It’s a lousy, generic cell phone that I hate.
I call it my “phone”. Like, if I’m looking for the recharger, I say “Darn it, where did I put the charger for my phone?”. I do not say “Darn it, where did I put the charger for my Razr?”. In fact it would sound really weird if I said “where did I put the charger for… Continue reading
IIM-A’S annual business summit Confluence 2009 concluded on Sunday with speakers stressing on innovation and entrepreneurship in relation to emerging economies and businesses and a new world order in terms of the economy.
At the valedictory function to mark the conclusion of the three-day summit, former President A P J Abdul Kalam urged the students to become “employment generators” rather than “employment seekers”.
At a panel discussion on ‘New World… Continue reading
Isaac Asimov once said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, “hmm…. that’s funny….”. Based on a 30 year study across 300 product categories and 225 countries, the phrase might actually be “Hmmm…. that’s what I thought.”
A new whitepaper from Phillip Roos from GFK sums up 30 years of findings started by product guru… Continue reading
Michael Gilbert writes:
Coolness is not innovation. That which is innovative is not always cool. More importantly, that which is cool is not always innovative. Indeed, cool can be seen as inherently conservative. If an invention is not already well on its way to adoption in certain (possibly small, probably themselves cool) circles, then it is too obscure to be cool. Even if we’d never use the actual word “cool”… Continue reading
Registration opens today for the 25th annual Emerging Issues Forum, which brings North Carolina business, academic and political notables together to talk about policy issues.
Registration for last year’s forum sold out.
The topic of the Feb. 8-9 forum at the Raleigh Convention Center is “Creativity Inc.” and participants will talk about creativity, art, culture, design, and how public policy can encourage breakthrough ideas.
Attending costs $350 per individual, or $225 for
Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications
- The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009
- Article history
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by Jeff Richardson, LSI CORPORATION
Generic multicore processors have been promoted as the solution to networking communication processing. In reality, they can’t address the scalability, determinism, and ease of programming required for next-generation networking infrastructure. An asymmetric multicore approach that blends multicore processors with networking-optimized accelerator engines and C-programmable libraries meets the challenges of next-generation networks.
Achieving deterministic performance is a key requirement for network operators to ensure reliability across wide variations… Continue reading
Disaster movie 2012 inspired panic in the States with Nasa having to reassure Americans that the world wasn’t about to end. Is movie viral marketing getting too clever for its own good?
One of the interesting fields of innovation today is business model innovation. Although technological innovations raise most interest and have the highest impact, business model innovation is the lever to business success in most cases. Examples like Google, Easyjet and IKEA prove that innovative business models can generate sustainable business success. In the module on Innovation & Entrepreneurship that I conduct for TSM Business School I… Continue reading
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