Yahoo India has upped the ante on the search engine wars. Thankfully it is not limited to advertising. A new ad campaign, however great, without the platform of a genuine product differentiation is a waste. While Google is almost generic to search, Yahoo could be the default option for many. Personally speaking, I use Yahoo Search as an alternative – so it is in the consideration set. This attempt is to create mind share for Yahoo Search leading to market share.
The product has an interesting feature bump – Yahoo Glue – attempts to bring all of the web into a single page. So if you search for say, Metallica it brings up news, articles, photos, videos and more into a single page – arranged neatly. Nifty, I must say. Google does bring up YouTube videos, images and so on but Yahoo Glue’s presentation is more user-friendly and easier on the eye. It makes sifting through various kinds of results, easy. Yahoo India and its agency have decided to sum up as ‘search faster’. The creative idea is to present the negative side of it – dramatizing what happens when ‘every second counts’.
While some may find the ad funny, I found it mildly entertaining, at best. The use of a stammering gent is 70s Bollywood humour. Remember comedians like Sundar and Keshto who stammered (and hammed) going ‘Kha..kha..kha..khane mein kya hai?‘. After a while you either get irritated or feel sorry for the guy. Anyway, I wasn’t sure if ‘faster search’ is the best summation of what the new Yahoo Search can deliver. I think by streamlining the results and presenting them in a user friendly way, it makes finding things easy. Yes, that is in way finding things faster, bust faster search and linking it to ‘time’ may connote that results appear faster (in terms of seconds) than competition. Find things easily also goes well with what you get in search results. And has creative possibilities too. Or so I think.