Everyone seems to be cleaning up their interfaces today. Hot on the heels of Google New, Yahoo's B2B division launched the imaginitively named, Yahoo! Advertising Solutions portal. However unlike the aforementioned competitor, this project was not created from a 20% employee time allocation, and instead took months of "brainstorming, researching, designing, engineering, writing, reworking, user testing, and collecting focus-group insights."
To be fair, it looks like the time has paid off as the portal is great looking for a B2B landing page, which are usually extremely boring, and has a fantastically 'aspirational' feel. In fact it's so modern and upbeat that it makes the Microsoft Advertising Community look like it was built on Ning.
However, the latter shouldn't feel too overshadowed as Yahoo have clearly borrowed a lot of ideas from them:
"Most importantly, the portal intends to foster a water-cooler environment for marketers, ad creatives, producers, publishers, and other advertising execs to be educated and inspired by Yahoo!-specific and industry-related content. Together with award-winning advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Yahoo!'s engineering, UED, and B2B teams worked hard to construct a content-rich experience within a modern visual design." Yodel Anecdotal (Y! Corp blog)
Whether a redesign will have a great impact on their fortunes is up for debate, but it is certainly a massive improvement on previous designs. Personally, I found a fair few points of interest on the site:
- Seth Godin discusses having guts as a marketer and what makes us human - "we're gonna get the truth, whether you want us to or not. So the question as a company is, are you gonna bet on secrets? or are you gonna bet on open?"
- The search marketing case studies
- Creative canvas - a palette of ad concepts which, unlike Google New, is easily shareable. Bravo Yahoo!
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