After giving a preview of its new “It’s You” marketing campaign last week, Yahoo formally begins the global push today. Yahoo says the campaign will cover “online, television, radio, print, and outdoor” advertising, all focused on selling the company’s focus on its users.

If you’re watching TV today, you may see this new “Anthem” ad:

Yahoo says the spot will air on all the major TV networks and top cable channels, and will begin airing in the UK and India on October 5. Other countries will get the ad in 2010.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: And in today’s Wall Street Journal, I came across this huge ad in the middle of the paper:

Below, zooming in on the smaller text in the lower right corner of the ad:

For those who can’t read the image, the text says:

It’s Yahoo.com, one of the most known, most visited sites on the planet. It crosses cultural boundaries, language boundaries, age gaps, gender gaps, and more. Which may be why more than 500 million people around the world visit Yahoo! every month.

It’s Yahoo!, redesigned, refined, reinvented, tested, and optimized to create what we belive is the most personally relevant Internet experience ever. With a homepage you can shape, your way. An Inbox that delivers email, your way. Search that finds things, your way. And all of it now mobile, to take things on the go.

Visit Yahoo! today. It’s a destination you may be familiar with. But it’s a whole new place.

It’s Y!ou

I wasn’t in the room but I watched a webcast of Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele’s keynote at the IAB Mixx conference this morning from New York. She introduced the new Yahoo Search but spent more time on the new $100 million (or so) ad campaign: “It’s Y!ou.” Danny live blogged the It’s Y!ou talk by Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, which also addressed a wide range of other issues.

On the whole I’d have to say the earlier Steele speech was unimpressive and too familiar sounding. Maybe it’s because they’ve been previewing the messaging informally for some time. And maybe because the themes and creative of the new campaign — though impressively polished — are much like the old and unsuccessful “Life Engine” campaign of 2004. But there were also too many cliches and platitudes in the speech and it was delivered without convincing passion. The word “passion” was used repeatedly but not equally evident from the podium or in the audience as Steele spoke to a largely unresponsive group of advertisers and agencies.

One of the major themes of the talk and new campaign is that Yahoo will help you “navigate life.” Steele rejected the distinction between online and offline: “the Web and your world are inseparable.” In parallel there was a discussion of Yahoo’s reach across the three screens: PC, mobile and TV accordingly. There was a lot of emphasis on communications but also on the new Yahoo homepage as evidence of this new personalized approach — a dashboard of sorts to help organize the internet.

I’m sure there have been numerous consumer focus groups leading up to the new campaign. And while many people would argue the $100 million (or more) would be better spent on engineers, I’m not going to deny that advertising helps shape perceptions. Yahoo’s got a stronger and “friendlier” consumer brand than AOL, Microsoft and maybe even Google at this point. So the campaign dollars may be well spent in maintaining that image.

Apple spends hugely on advertising and marketing to support a brand perception in the market, at a company level and on the level of specific products. However Apple’s products deliver and fulfill the messaging. Here that’s not the case to the same degree.

The challenge and the problem is that Yahoo sites and services must actually fulfill the promise of helping people organize and navigate all the information out there. People are overwhelmed by information overload and “the paradox of choice.” They do need trusted sources, they do need simplification, they do need assistance. But I’m not sure that Yahoo delivers as promised.

Yahoo has lots of reach and lots of top traffic destinations: news, sports, mail, finance, etc. But Yahoo needs to actually create best of class tools and it needs to find simple ways to help consumers integrate all the information coming at them. The homepage is a good start, but it’s not enough. Search Pad is useful but not the “kick ass” product it needs to be to really set Yahoo apart.

There is a disconnect between right-sounding rhetoric and the reality of Yahoo today. I hope that the company can close the gap and be the personalized destination that it aspires to be.

Along with a new search format, Yahoo has rolled out a new “It’s You” marketing push with clever slogans like “The Internet Is Under New Management, Yours.” The company is holding a press conference shortly, and I’m here liveblogging it. Let’s do this.

We’re waiting. So are you.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz up, welcoming people. Wishing it were fashion week but not advertising week here (gets laughs). Yahoo really is committed to be the center of people’s lives online. Like 600 million people come each month (or was that day?). It’s a lot, get it.

They want to be entertained, informed. … you can hear that’s exactly how we’re positioning the company.

We’re pleased we can start today to talk about the new campaign.

Elisa Steel CMO up. Yahoo sees two pieces, “My World” & “The World.”

Bringing the best of the web in one place (that’s Yahoo) and not necessarily just Yahoo’s own info.

“that’s where the yodal is” Yahoo says they call it, where sorry buzzword buzzword value of consumers and intersecting with them.

Only Yahoo can be associated with combining The World and My World. Keep things meaningful and memorable. Tough thing to get that message to a broad audience. You, you, you, you (I feel like I’m in a Blues Brothers song every time Yahoo does this you you thing).

Showing the “It’s You” motto. Well, “I’s Y!ou” because Yahoo hasn’t lost that stupid exclamation mark. That would have been a campaign. Kill the exclamation mark.

It’s about every you around the globe. Every you in every country in every geography. Easily translatable and locally relevant around the world (I can see Yahoo’s ad team mentally patting themselves on the back for avoiding global translation problems). Multi-channel campaign but grounded in the “digital discipline.” Lots of ads on Yahoo.com and around the net (say Google?)

Looking at creative. Internet under new management, it’s you (like I said above). Copy on one, “Introducing you, the new chief executive. It’s you.”

Another: “This time it’s personal.” All represents a commitment from Yahoo that they’ll deliver on the relevance of the personal you.

Seeing much more of this stuff, but you can see it yourself. Go here. Note that the server is down right now.

You can use the internet to navigate life. That’s what Yahoo brings to you. One way to express isn’t just still photography. They have video, too! And we’ve just watched it.

Time for the actual Q&A. We have Carol, Elisa plus Hilary Schneider, executive VP. Tapan Bhat, SVP, Penny Baldwin, SVP of global integrated marketing.

Question on marketing budget. Budget is over 100 million for the campaign. US, Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, missed some of the other countries.

Question from some Erick dude from TechCrunch. How does TechCrunch get to be on the front of Yahoo all the time. No, he didn’t say that. Talk about search, display and “is there anything you won’t sell.”

Hilary: On ad trends, starting to see a stablization but not bold recovery. Bartz: “We’re bumping around the bottom.” Bartz: The focus of the company is to really engage … that we’re ready to put our signature on the bottom of every page that goes out on the internet that says Yahoo … things that might have been a good idea a few years ago have to think more about. Is there anything you won’t sell? Of course not (I think that was the quote — tone of well, you’re always open to stuff).

Now balancing my video camera on a water bottle. Why’d I forget my tripod. I know, you don’t care.

Question on competitive threat about Google and ad exchange. Hilary: We start with the fact we really pioneered the display marketspace. Proud they have the largest exchange. Market is fragmented. We welcome Google and connecting with them because ultimately its about how do we create an open marketplace.

Question: why hit reset button with consumers when some think Yahoo issues are with advertisers. Bartz: “Advertisers follow consumers” (nice point). “You always need to build circulation” This is a way of building circulation. We also by doing this very personalized approach. We’re expanding the relationship to get everyone in the world excited.

Elisa: Need to get consumers to “check out Yahoo again … because the experience is different than what they remember from 5 years ago.”

Question: what about video. Bartz: video crucial, way to entertain, inform, so there’s a big emphasis inside Yahoo on our video platforms, our video serving, way to serve.

Question: What are metrics of success. Elisa: Will run in 15 countries I think for 18 months. Try to measure emotional connection and bond. And are they driving traffic and getting them to spend more time on the key sites they know and love on Yahoo.

Question on new search experience. Tapan: It’s really about creating personal relevance. Done some work on search monkey, allow to highlight some innovations that Yahoo search has done. If you’re searching for information on how to kayak, there are very interesting things like local restaurants. By allowing to filter by certain sites or see snippets, we create a much more relevant campaign.

Question: will search be in the ad campaign? Penny: brand, brand only, brand benefit and product driven communication. Product communications will have a huge role, yes (but not clear what’s on search).

Question: Is Zimbra being shot? Bartz: We don’t comment on if something’s being shot or not. That’s not good business practices. Says Zimbra tech is very important to Yahoo mail system and that was one reason Yahoo bought them.

Question: How is this campaign different from ones in the past, say connected life. It feels like I’ve heard before

Elisa: hasn’t been here i the past. this is incredibly different. this sin’t a marketing campaign of a short term nature. Carol’s staff and carol are all behing the concept of personal relevance. If this wa just a marketing cmapaign or a slogal, we’ve really failed. It’s a company campaign.

Bartz: Yahoo has evolved over the past 14 years as the internet has evolved. We were all so glad we could search the web and find things at the Library Of Congress. But how much of that do you need now (IE, you want more local things, not look and how amazing you what’s there in general). This is a highlyly evolved bigger concept, now the internet .. i can undestand it has a similar tone, because it’s what Yahoo is. We’re taking it farther than it’s been. I’m actually happy that you think it’s somewhat the same, becasue that’s what Yahoo stands for. 76% of US pop comes to Yahoo. When there’s braking tnews, they know to come.

Question: Clarify the role of search. Is that an attraction or something you provide just if people get there for other things?

Bartz: I view search, teh algorithmic side of word as how often you cralw the web, how deep, how much you gather up .. whne we relaly think about search, we think about those 10 blue links. We used to be excited about that? We used to get all these answers and then realize they’r enot good. Views search as an intel chip … but the experienc that HP wraps around those chips is differen than what Dell wrap around them. trying to wrap the Yahoo experience aorund that. Search is vital for us. we;re wstable at like 19% of the busines. Users are happy. If we continue to impress them, we’ll continue to drive relvance for them, perform a service with and form them .. and so search is incredibly important to us and our advertiers, but what is most important is that we dirve upstream even those the plumbing is down here.

Sorry those are scrambled, two above questions were mine, hard to type and also look at someone answering you. I’ll upload video on those later (shaky though it will be with my water bottle tripod).

Question: how do people want to customize? Tapan: Home page most, people want to have it personalized, but they don’t actually do it a ton. So you have to incrementally get them to do this (you know, how like Excite asked for your zip code back in 1996).

Question: Looking at ways to bring in “external text messaging services”.  Tapan: home page strategy is that you should be able to pull in whatever you want. So are there RSS feeds.

Question: From the earlier keynote today, they showed a way to let you “add value” to every page on the web. Tapan: that was just a concept, not active right now.

Question: What involvement from Ogilvy? Elisa: Embarked on this a few months ago with Carol and her staff. Then brought in Landor & Associates for strategy and Ogilvy for creative.

Question on Microsoft-Yahoo Deal – Bartz: going as expected, got a very common second request, stand by original prediction of April of next year.

Question: “I think people decided Yahoo had a cloud over its head … we need something shiny and different … Yahoo is well loved outside NY and Silicon Valley. Inside, they all go mooo ohhhh. In passport control, people tell her stories about Yahoo and yodal. Jesus, I want to transfer you guys. Why are you so cynical about us. Why aren’t you cynical about Google? .. see, you got it. You’ve got me pissed off” [so glad i turned the video on, promise, I'll upload it]

Question: When expect to see returns from users and earnings? Elisa: We’ll expect some change from users in next three months. From brand level, that’ll be closer than 12 months. Earnings: We wouldn’t comment on that today. Bartz: Don’t just focus on the campaign. There’s product promise behind that. There’s going to be a combined offer.

Question: about viral efforts (I think) and something else: Bartz: “It’s our business to try hard .. shame on us if we don’t.” and “We have our own viral effect.”

Tapan: This is not just an ad campaign. This is a fundamental way we build out products [in 2005, that was make it all social. But important, Yahoo's marketing message is overshadowing that Bartz is trying to reconfigure the company itself that build stuff that makes people feel they can control all the information they need out there. You know, organize the world's information and make it universally .... you."

Elisa talking about how consumers around the world love the brand, they yodel (people really do this? apparently!).

Question: Where do you want to be a year, two years from now. Bartz: Before, people were very focused on their property. There wasn't a network Yahoo effect. Or when I came, it didn't seem like that. These plans are very integrated. Elisa said I'm not putting this out here unless product is going to do them with quality something and pride. It isn't about throwing this up on a site. It's about engaging the consumer ... can get things in one place, easier to use, easy to customize [have to say, it's not new message, but Yahoo doesn't have a push that no one's doing now. Google's not saying organize your life; Microsoft isn't really; nor is Facebook. Real question is are people already doing it in a way that makes them feel they don't need to change].

Question: Yahoo stock down 8%, Google’s up 16% — why isn’t Wall Street behind Yahoo. Bartz: Yahoo and Google are different companies. They are different businesses. The investors are somewhat like you guys, let’s wait and see. This direct comparison with Google, we aren’t comparable companies. It’s our job to drive our stock price up separate from what Google does.

Question: Who would you like to be compared to? Bartz: Yahoo. The closest one is AOL. Google maniacal about running an algorithm. We’re personal. If you go to Yahoo India, feels part of India, not some one world approach. That’s not Facebook’s strategy, that’s not Twitter’s strategy. That’s not to say we’re not part of a greater tech sector … by Yahoo is the only brand that can make the promise of uniting your world and the world … more and more and more, we’re going to focus on the use side. Getting this easy personalization and excitement about managing the web from one place is the core of our focus.

Question of stock sales. Bartz: I didn’t sell anything. Got stock, and when some of it vested, some of it is kept by Yahoo for taxes by company. Like if you got 100 shares, 20 would be held back. But it gets recorded as if it is a share. I haven’t sold one penny of Yahoo stock. And thanks for asking, because it pissed me off when they said I sold.

And we’re done.

Techmeme has some coverage on today’s announcement forming now, and I’m sure other live blogging and news reports will be appearing. So check them out, too.

Postscript: Very sorry, my video was lost due to some glitch with my Flip camera. Sigh.

It’s not real. But I sure wish it were, Google going all Kanye West on people searching for Taylor Swift.

In the mockup above you can see Google responding “I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish your search, but did you mean: beyonce” instead of the usual “Did You Mean” spelling correction.

The mockup is from the I Am Bored site, which I found via this discussion by Jess Lee on FriendFeed. And while that might entirely fictional (trust me, it is — I’ve tried to reproduce it in various ways. Not. Real.), Yahoo kind of goes all Kanye on its competitors in real life.

Search for Google on Yahoo, and you get this:

Search for Bing, and you get this:

In both cases, Yahoo puts up a box to let you search through Yahoo rather than going directly to its competitors. It’s gonna let you finish going to them, but first….

Kanye’s actually following in Yahoo’s footsteps. Yahoo’s been interrupting searches like this for ages.

The New York Times has an interview out with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz where she declares that Yahoo has “never been a search company.” Astounding, in that that this is not true.

Part of me thinks, “Why bother arguing?” As my A Search Eulogy For Yahoo post from last week explains, whatever Yahoo was, if the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal with goes through, Yahoo’s done as a search engine. Heck, Bartz had effectively taken it out of the search game weeks before the deal was announced by backing away from search as a feature.

Even if the deal should fail — Yahoo is still finished as a search player, now that Bartz has declared to the world that her company apparently can’t even afford to keep up. There’s no going back from that.

But part of me doesn’t like history being rewritten, especially by a CEO who should know her own company’s history. Yahoo was indeed a search engine. It was the very first “feature” that Yahoo offered. Long before email, or IM, or Yahoo Sports or Yahoo News, there’s was Yahoo the search engine.

Search was Yahoo’s origin story. To say Yahoo was never a search engine is like saying Superman wasn’t originally from Krypton or that Spider-Man was never bitten by a spider.

Yes, at first Yahoo’s search was powered by human editors, rather than machines. By 1999, the majority of search engines out there used human editors as the basis of their search. When machine-based search took over, Yahoo shifted along to that eventually, spending plenty for its own technology.

Over the years, I’ve received plenty of Yahoo press releases highlighting that Yahoo was a search engine; was in plenty of briefings where this was discussed. Yahoo spent on plenty on commercials to tell consumers this, such as the one below:

So please, spare me the talk about how Yahoo was never a search engine. It was.

It’s not now, nor is it going to be in the future. As the New York Times piece gets into, Bartz is happy hoping Yahoo hangs on to the 20% share of searches it still has as a legacy from its glory days. There’s apparently no intention to try and grow this.

The NYT piece also highlights how Yahoo expects to move even more firmly into the original content area. The company has long struggled with this. Is it a search engine that points outward to resources, or is it a content company that produces its own material? Clearly, it’ll be a content company — and maybe it will be more successful with that this time without all that search baggage.

Postscript from Greg Sterling:

A couple of years ago Yahoo certainly did consider itself a search company, with a competitive search engine. Said then SVP of search and marketplaces Jeff Weiner in 2002:

“Our objective is to provide the highest-quality search experience, and to be the leading provider of search [technology] on the Internet”

That quote appeared in an article on the heels of Yahoo’s $235 million acquisition of Inktomi in which the following paraphrase of Weiner’s remarks on search also appeared:

Yahoo feels that it can provide a better searching experience to its users if the company uses in-house engineers and assets instead of licensing technology from another company, Weiner said.

The market also thought Yahoo was trying to compete in search because there was immediate criticism and concern voiced over then Yahoo CFO Sue Decker’s 2006 comment:

“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

Decker was forced to clarify her remarks and backtrack later. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s remarks seem to be something of a replay in an effort to manage expectations now that Yahoo has formally exited the search business.

Postscript from Danny Sullivan:

In various places, I keep seeing people talking about how Yahoo “outsourced” search for most of the time, bringing in names like AltaVista, Inktomi and so on. Yahoo did NOT outsource search for most of its life, and I’ll detail this for the record, below.

March 3, 1995: Yahoo’s birthday, as the company recently reflected upon. Yahoo operated before that, but this was when the company was officially incorporated. The ONLY product was search. You either browsed for web sites by following categories or you did keyword searches.

Behind the scenes, Yahoo used editors who categorized web sites to create its core listings. This was a “directory” model to search. Yahoo was unique among the early players in doing this. That did NOT mean Yahoo lacked search tech. Those directory listings had to be searched through, and quickly, and you needed relevancy algorithms applied to them.

In contrast, there was also the “crawler” approach to building listings, which is commonplace today. This is where search engine automatically visit web pages, make copies of them, then return the most relevant pages first (as best they can guess using search algorithms). That involves much more tech.

Early crawlers were good when you needed to find the needle in the haystack (”long tail search”, but the relevancy was bad for common queries, such as trying to find an official site or the best site for a popular term. Directories did much better at this — and that is why Yahoo grew in popularity over its crawler-based rivals, at first.

Yahoo did outsource to a crawler partner to provide “backup” if it had nothing for a search query out of its own database. The first partner for this was Open Text. You would only see Open Text listings if Yahoo had no listings of its own. The main listings always came from Yahoo.

Mid-1996: Yahoo partnered with AltaVista for its crawler-based backup results. The primary search results on Yahoo still came from its own directory, using its own search technology.

Mid-1998: Yahoo partnered with Inktomi for its crawler-based backup results. Again, primary search results on Yahoo came from Yahoo’s own directory, using its own search technology.

Mid-2000: Yahoo partners with Google for its crawler-based backup results. Same thing as with the other partners — Yahoo’s own listings were still the main ones that searchers saw, using its own editors, its own search tech.

Oct. 2002: Yahoo renews with Google and makes a dramatic shift to its search results. For the first time, crawler-based results are used for the main listings. They’re enhanced with references to the Yahoo Directory, but by and large, Yahoo was simply rebranding Google. This is the first time Yahoo really outsourced its search listings.

Feb. 2004: Yahoo ends use of Google’s search listings in favor of its own crawler-based search technology. In the time since renewing with Google, Yahoo went on a crawler-based technology shopping spree. It announced a deal to buy Inktomi at the end of 2002, completing that in early 2003. It also purchased Overture (formerly GoTo), known primarily for its paid search technology. But Overture also itself had recently bought both the AltaVista and AllTheWeb crawler services. Technologies from all these sources were blended together to create Yahoo Search.

Aug. 2009: Yahoo Search continues to power Yahoo’s main listings, but a deal with Microsoft would give up that technology next year. Yahoo would outsource for the second time in its history — and this time, for good.

The Outsource Myth

As you can see, Yahoo fully outsourced its search listings only once in its 14 1/2 years, from October 2002 through February 2004. That’s a total of 16 months. So for 91% of its time, aside from that tiny window, Yahoo was running its own search tech. It devoted substantial resources to search technology during the first 7 years when it used a directory system. It devoted even more substantial resources over the past 5 years it has been using a crawler-based model. To say Yahoo was never a search company simply flies in the face of the evidence.

Happy New Years everyone! Below is a collection of logos for the special day from the search industry, reposted from my other search blog, here for everyone to see. On behalf of the Search Engine Land team, we would like to wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009!

Google’s Logo:

Yahoo’s Animated Logo:
Seems like Yahoo had a calendar that said December 31, but on New Years itself, they have nothing. Update, they had a logo for a few hours, a reader sent it to me, here it is:

Live.com’s Theme:

AOL’s Animated Logo:

Ask.com’s Theme:
2008…

2009…

DogPile’s Logo:

Baidu’s Logo:

BruceClay’s Logo:

Cre8asite Forums Logo:

Search Engine Roundtable’s Theme:

Yahoo has changed the way they handle a query for a competing search engine. Now, if you search at Yahoo for google, live or ask.com, Yahoo will tell you, “You could go to [Search Engine Name Goes Here]. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

This is a lot more humorous than what Yahoo did in the past. I have a screen capture of how Yahoo handled this in the past at the Search Engine Roundtable. Here it is:

You won’t always get a search box, I believe if you refresh your search, Yahoo may remove the search box. Here is a picture of the same message, without the search box:

Do you get the message? Why go to Google, when you are already at Yahoo? Why not just stay here? I suspect it works because I cannot tell you have many novice searchers use search engines to find other search engines.

Do note, the other three search engines do not currently do anything similar.

Yahoo is launching an “integrated, nationwide, on and offline marketing campaign” to promote the “new Yahoo Search.” It emphasizes online display and radio advertising. Animated banners link to actual Yahoo Search results.  The online display campaign is promoting Search Assist and Shortcuts (vs. Google: “don’t get lost in the links”). The sample radio spot uses humor and emphasizes anti-virus protection. It also mentions Google by name.

Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft have all run past ad campaigns to try and eat into Google’s market share, almost entirely without success. The message in this campaign (from what I could tell) is that Yahoo is more efficient than Google: answers vs. links.

Despite increasing discomfort within the industry regarding Google’s size and power, there seems to be no indication from the public that they’re ready to abandon Google. In fact, Google outscored other engines in the 2008 American Consumer Satiisfaction Index.

With the right approach, however, there may be an opening and opportunity for Yahoo to gain some incremental usage.

Happy Holidays, Search Engine Land Readers! The logos above are from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com for the 2007 holiday season. Google will actually be uploading a new holiday logo each day, Yahoo’s logo is very animated, and Ask.com has snowflakes falling from the sky! Plus, as always, ‘07 Holiday Season Logos & Themes From Search Industry shows the logos from other search related sites, including Dogpile at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Happy holidays!

This Associated Press article chronicles how Google has been able to build a multi-billion dollar consumer brand largely without advertising. That’s the part everybody knows. But the article also compares the annual ad spending of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay. It points out that when Google does buy any advertising, it’s typically to recruit employees.

Citing no particular source, the article says:

While major rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. pour more than 20 percent of their annual revenue into sales and marketing, Google devoted 8 percent of its revenue to the category in 2006, spending a total of $849.5 million. Microsoft spent $11.5 billion on marketing and sales in its last fiscal year, while Yahoo spent $1.3 billion. On advertising and promotions alone, Google spent $188 million in 2006 — roughly the same amount Microsoft spends every two months.

Another Internet bellwether, online auctioneer eBay Inc., consistently earmarks 14 percent to 15 percent of its revenue for advertising. Last year, eBay spent $871 million on advertising, with much of the money winding up in Google’s wallet. The Coca-Cola Co., the brand ranked first in the Interbrand survey, spent more than $2.5 billion on advertising last year.

While Google did some online advertising for its Checkout payment service last year, and has sponsored segments of local public radio in the San Francisco Bay Area and public television, the Goog411 ads that have been popping up on the U.S. East and West Coasts represent an interesting departure for the company. They may suggest more consumer marketing to come in key, competitive areas — especially mobile services.