D&AD Yahoo!
Yahoo wants to put its brand back in the minds and mouths of consumers. Its goal is to create the next generation of consumers for the brand, those who are currently saying: ‘Ya-WHO?’
Whilst many Gen Z and Gen Alpha have heard of and even visited Yahoo, they don’t know what the brand stands for (or what it truly does). We need to go beyond Yahoo’s products and get people to reconnect with the brand, supporting its goal to help us navigate our digital lives.
Your task? Create a brand activation idea that can help Yahoo reach these consumers in an authentic way, driving brand love and perception shift. You need to tell Gen Z and Gen Alpha who Yahoo is and why they should care, encouraging this audience to talk about the brand.
Research Methods & Process
At this stage, our tutors encouraged us to revisit the brief more critically and dig deeper conceptually. Our 2014-inspired redesign leaned too heavily toward a website revamp, which wasn’t the core objective. While we were excited about the avatar concept, we recognized it felt too reminiscent of Snapchat. Realizing we needed a deeper understanding of Generation Alpha before moving forward, we conducted a series of interviews with Gen Alpha participants to inform our next steps.
With this newfound insight into our target audience, we went back to brainstorming keeping Generation Alpha in mind.
These images show our lateral thinking exercise, which we completed after our initial research and following feedback from peers and tutors. This brainstorming session helped us break out of conventional ideas and led us to develop the concept “Yahoo! Good News”—a campaign centered around a newspaper and minisite inspired by early 2000s aesthetics, referencing Yahoo!’s cultural peak during that era. The next thing we did was create the newspaper and have a photoshoot.
