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Yahoo to Showcase Entertainment Brands

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 January 2007, 18:00 CST

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Yahoo Inc., overshadowed by several Internet rivals over the past year, is piggybacking on some of the entertainment industry's leading brands in its latest attempt to bolster its own brand.

The "Brand Universe" initiative, unveiled at a media luncheon at its Sunnyvale headquarters this week, will showcase a pop-culture potpourri of television shows, movies, video games and celebrities on 100 different Web sites that Yahoo plans to create later this year.

Each of the new sites will revolve around one of the entertainment brands tabbed by Yahoo for star treatment.

The sites will pull together an array of photos, message board discussions, blogs and news stories focused on each featured brand, with Yahoo pulling the information from its own Web pages and other Internet destinations.

The branding promotion comes as Yahoo has lost some of its luster on Wall Street and the Web.

Investors became increasingly frustrated with Yahoo last year as its earnings growth fell further behind online search leader Google Inc., provoking a December shake-up that included the departure of Lloyd Braun - the executive who formerly ran the media group behind Brand Universe.

Meanwhile, rapidly growing social-networking sites like News Corp.'s MySpace.com and Facebook.com have been luring more teenagers and young adults. Feeling the heat, Yahoo tried to buy Facebook last summer, only to be rebuffed.

Yahoo has picked out seven brands so far: Nintendo Co.'s Wii video game console; a pair of video games, "The Sims" and "Halo"; a pair of TV television series, "Lost" and "The Office"; and multimedia franchises, "Harry Potter" and the Transformers. The remaining brands will be identified by the end of February, according to Vince Broady, the Yahoo executive overseeing Brand Universe.

After Yahoo launched the Wii site with no fanfare last fall, it drew 1.2 million visitors in November, Broady said. None of Brand Universe's other sites are operating yet.

Broady won't say how Yahoo is picking the featured brands, other than to say a spot can't be bought. But Broady said Yahoo plans to share traffic and behavioral data with the featured companies and celebrities in an effort to please potential advertisers, potentially blurring a wall of separation closely guarded in traditional media.

"We are totally open to driving a result that makes a partner want to work with us," Broady said.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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