BRANDING

YAHOO BRAND GUIDELINES
WRITER & GROUP CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Yahoo needed to unite its various properties and show up across products as a single brand evocative of its joyful roots. So we rebranded, in partnership with agencies Pentagram (logo design) and Elephant (brand strategy). My team and I authored full brand guidelines as well as hosted brand primer sessions for both employees and agencies.

When getting input from various business units, we bumped up against objection to a unified voice, the rationale being that a brand couldn’t tackle serious issues (Yahoo News) in the same voice as more flippant pursuits (Yahoo Sports, entertainment). We taught about voice vs. tone and built a “fixed and flexible” system, educating that a single persona can speak differently in different situations while maintaining elements of its core self.

I certainly don’t use the same language at a party as at, say, my doctor’s office. Do you?

Once the voice and visual system were established, we held brand primer sessions to brief the thousands of folks who create Yahoo’s content and apps on how to embody the brand character in everything from editorial content to events to marketing to product development. For example, unifying the many Yahoo podcasts…

To keep the brand in check, our team built a compliance pipeline to give notes on brand tone and imagery for work from various teams both internal and external. We not only captured the brand’s essential combination of ‘real, helpful and playful’ but also put it to work in marketing, editorial and product, with increases in brand compliance quarter over quarter for two years straight.

In addition to guiding internal teams (editorial, marketing and product), “real, helpful, playful” defined the brand character for all partnerships and activations extending Yahoo into pop culture. I led brand voice conversations with brand partners including The Game Show Network and Toyota, as well as with production and creative agencies like Superfly and Barrett.

Over the course of a year, we refreshed and unified the brand, successfully bringing together more than six different business units, resulting in growing brand compliance quarter over quarter. We helped all Yahoos see how they could be part of the same brand devoted to helping people be more into whatever they’re into.

Group Creative Directors: Lee Piper, Emmy Morton
Design Direction: Matt Tynan, Toph Clarke
Copywriting: Lauren Hoffman, Asterios Kokkinos
Lead Producer: Peter Lenz
VP, Head of Creative: Jim Bosiljevac
Head of Brand Strategy: Jeff Clift
Brand Check: Laura Swiatkowski, Caroline Bailey, Patty Clark, Lena Holt