In the battle for supremacy among search engines, Yahoo! has a terrific secret weapon – but this ad doesn’t do it justice
MY CURRENT FAVORITE search engine on the Web is Google. Somehow it manages to sift through more than 1 billion sites in less than a second and come up with those matching your keywords. Each entry displays a brief summary showing the keywords boldfaced in context so you can get a quick idea of the relevance of the site to your need.
But when it comes to shopping, I prefer Yahoo!. MySimon runs a close second – it’s very good for comparison shopping, but doesn’t have the one-click buying offered by Yahoo!’s Wallet Express Checkout. And while you can scroll down in both mySimon and Yahoo! for a preliminary look at what they’ve found, each mySimon selection doesn’t have a mini-picture of the product the way Yahoo! does – you have to click and open up a detailed entry for the picture.
Also, Yahoo! tells you how many items it’s located and allows you to presort them by price category.
So I’ve always felt Yahoo! could gain an advantage over its competitors by trumpeting the benefits of Yahoo! Shopping. Even if other shopping engines are just as good, Yahoo! Shopping could still come out ahead by making what David Ogilvy called “the pre-emptive claim” in its advertising. Meaning others may have the item, but we’re the only ones to claim it.
Alas, the Yahoo! ad I’ve chosen for this month’s makeover fails to take advantage of this opportunity.
It appears to have been done by one of those hot young 23-year-old creatives who think all readers of magazine and newspaper advertising love “Saturday Night Live” and Adam Sandler movies the way they do.
As usual, the ad involves a feeble sophomoric joke: namely, suggesting you can cheat your boss by shopping on your office computer while pretending to work. Does Yahoo! really want to build its reputation by urging prospective customers to cheat? And is Yahoo! Shopping different from other sites in that when you use the latter, the boss will know you’re not working?
As if that weren’t bad enough, the headline (“Nobody will ever know you’re shopping”) isn’t really borne out by the illustration. The photo appears to show military personnel working at a radar screen or something. Certainly it’s not a personal computer, which to the best of my knowledge doesn’t have a round screen. Maybe the art director couldn’t find a stock photo of people using office computers?
Down in the left-hand corner is the usual itty-bitty body copy: “Now you can visit thousands of stores without ever leaving your desk. Everything from Brooks Brothers to Sausage Express. So happy shopping. But hey, keep an eye out for the Man.”
Wait a minute. I thought “nobody will ever know you’re shopping.” So why do I have to keep an eye peeled for the Man? And is that all Yahoo! Shopping has to say about its advantages?
Furthermore, doesn’t anybody ever do it the honest way and shop at home?
What an embarrassment.
My makeover is based on the assumption that if readers really understood how Yahoo! Shopping works, they’d want to try it. And I thought the best way to achieve that was to take them through an actual shopping experience step by step.
Note the many numbers and specific references in the new ad. I count about 25. These are the gemstones that make copy sparkle.
That’s all for now. Gotta go shopping – and not on a radar screen.
Network
