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YAHOO'S BRILLIANT SOLUTION
Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she's been
spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media
company on the planet. As Chrysler's director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a
budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. She decides how
many minutes of the carmaker's commercials appear on networks and cable channels nationwide and
how many pages of its ads turn up in magazines like this one and newspapers such as USA Today.
Here's the scary part: Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online
advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next
year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%. Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler's
money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm:
\"I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are.\"
No wonder media executives are concerned. One of their headaches is Googlemania--Google effectively
reinvented online advertising with the targeted, classified-like text links that you now see everywhere.
Soaring profits from selling those ads have helped drive Google's stock market capitalization to some $85
billion, making Google the most highly prized media company in the world. But while the old guard is
keeping a watchful eye on Google, the company it really fears--and the one advertisers like Roehm
increasingly love--is Yahoo.
It's been easy for most people to overlook the media and advertising juggernaut that Terry Semel,
Yahoo's CEO, has assembled since he arrived from Hollywood four years ago. That's partly because
Semel makes himself easy to overlook. He's not a showman like Apple's Steve Jobs or a high-tech rock
star like Google's Larry Page or Sergey Brin. In fact, he seems to work hard at being bland. Listen to him
theorize about the online revolution: \"The great part about the Internet of all the existing mediums from
before is that it's the first one that is truly global, and its impact is massive.\" Caffeine, anyone? Semel
doesn't care if he's boring. Like many good negotiators, he knows that the more he says publicly, the less
he's likely to win. Twenty years of doing movie deals as co-CEO of Warner Bros. taught him that. At 62,
Semel's a behind-the-scenes guy, a strategist with a bold master plan: to transform Yahoo into the 21st
century's first media titan. He has surrounded himself not with nerdy brainiacs but with veteran advertising
and media executives adept at building bridges to the powerful businesses that feel the most threatened
by the Internet.
So far, Semel has put together one of the web's hottest winning streaks. When he took over in 2001, the
Sunnyvale, Calif., portal--founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo--was a mess. The dot-com
bubble had burst, revenues had fallen by half, and red ink flooded the bottom line. As the founders took a
back seat (today Yang acts as the resident visionary, and Filo works in IT), Semel and his enforcer, COO
Dan Rosenzweig, set about diversifying sales beyond the banner ads Yahoo had lived off. He added
search advertising, online classifieds, and a host of commission-generating businesses such as selling
SBC and Verizon broadband subscriptions. The moves transformed a money loser into a $3-billion-a-year
company that this year will post operating income in excess of $1 billion--a near-Microsoftian operating
margin of some 30%. (By comparison, Google is about the same size, but its margins are almost double.)
Today Yahoo arguably offers the online world's broadest array of information and entertainment for users,
married to the web's most sophisticated collection of offerings for advertisers. Each month more than 430
million people worldwide typically visit one of its myriad sites.
Until recently Semel's grand plan was missing a crucial strand: widespread use of online advertising by
big marketers like Chrysler. Burned or disillusioned by the bubble, they questioned whether online
advertising would ever match the effectiveness of commercials or print ads. Sure, Google's text ads work,
because you throw them in front of users just as they are looking to buy or research something online--
like a smart, aggressive yellow pages. (MSN and Yahoo's search ads work the same way.) But using the
Internet to sell \"that Pepsi feeling\"--creating and fostering an emotional attachment to a brand--was a
challenge of an entirely different order. Most marketers doubted that it could be done.
But lately decision-makers like Roehm are seeing the Internet in a new light. Their conversion can be
explained in one word: broadband. Roughly a third of U.S. households now have high-speed Internet
connections, which has done two things that advertisers like. It has caused the average time Americans
spend online to grow 50% since 2001, according to Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., research
firm. Surfing the Internet now takes up 15% of the time Americans spend with all media, it says. (That's
conservative, say Forrester Research and many advertisers, who believe the number is double that.)
Second, instead of handcuffing advertisers to the banner ads of the bubble years, broadband has freed
them to fashion creative messages that are more like TV commercials.
In a May report Forrester surveyed 99 major advertisers and 20 ad agencies and found that nearly 85% of
them planned to expand their online ad budgets this year. More significant, it reported a radical shift from
the belief that brand building and the Internet don't mix. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed said that
online advertising was a brand-building tool \"equal to or better than\" advertising on TV or in print.
Anecdotal evidence supports that. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a big advertiser--P&G, Pepsi,
and Georgia Pacific are recent examples--announcing plans to expand promotion of its products online.
The trend means that a huge volume of brand advertising will flow into the online world--$8 billion to $12
billion a year by 2010, depending on whom you ask, up from less than $5 billion now, about 3.5% of total
U.S. spending on brand advertising.
For Semel and Yahoo, that is the best possible news. Although Google leads the pack in the $5-billion-ayear
market for search-related ads, Yahoo is increasingly competitive there. And in the scrum for online
brand advertising--almost as large a market--Yahoo is poised to grab the biggest share. Its 181 million
active registered users are probably the largest online clientele, which means Yahoo can tell advertisers it
knows the habits of more users than any other portal--or any traditional media company. In contrast,
Google never trained its users to register and has only recently started to ask them to sign up for services
like e-mail or blogging. What's more, measured by page views--the indicator that brand advertisers watch
most--Yahoo users are the most engaged. Yahoo generated nearly twice as many page views --178
million worldwide in May--as its nearest competitor, MSN. (MSN generated 96 million page views in May,
Google 68 million, and AOL [which, like FORTUNE, is owned by Time Warner] 39 million, according to
Comscore Media Metrix.) Says Brian McAndrews, CEO of Aquantive, one of the largest advertising firms
specializing in Internet distribution: \"Yahoo's opportunity is massive.\" And while its online rivals are
ramping up to attract brand advertising too, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker says the
advantage right now is Yahoo's: \"If you're new to online advertising (and a lot of big advertisers are),
Yahoo is your first call because they do everything.\"
The woman Semel has hired to go after brand-advertising dollars is no one you would expect to find at a
tech company. Wenda Millard, Yahoo's 50-year-old head of ad sales, looks and acts like the publisher of
a fashion magazine. She talks about the importance of \"engaging\" and \"delighting\" users, about
\"relationships\" and \"building trust\" with advertisers. And she does it in an even, mellifluous purr that is
both reassuring and utterly persuasive.
No wonder: Before jumping in 1996 to DoubleClick, the once-powerful Internet ad-processing company,
and then to Yahoo in 2001, Millard spent 20 years in the magazine business. She started out selling ads
for Ladies' Home Journal and New York magazine. By 38 she was publisher of Family Circle, making her
one of the industry's youngest publishers and the first woman to run a major women's magazine. Though
she works for Yahoo, she is based in New York City, and is unapologetic about her old-media ways.
Indeed, she--and many others--thinks they are her greatest asset. \"When you're asking a major marketer
to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new medium, they want to trust you,\" she says. \"If I didn't
have a relationship with the presidents of all these FORTUNE 1,000 companies or the heads of all these
agencies, why would they trust me?\"
Remember, during the bubble the Internet portals, including Yahoo, thought their sites would forever be in
such demand that they could cut ad agencies out of the loop and take orders directly from advertisers by
e-mail. They viewed media's traditional lunching and golfing with advertisers and their agencies as a
waste of time. That arrogance backfired when the bubble burst, and portals became persona non grata on
Madison Avenue.
Millard was the first to make peace. Because of her background, she recognized the importance of
agencies as gatekeepers for big advertisers and reinstated them as partners. McAndrews of Aquantive
says that earned her lasting credibility with him and other middlemen.
By 2003, advertisers and agencies were starting to respond to Yahoo's broad reach, diverse ad offerings,
and deep knowledge of its users. Today Yahoo is where Dave Burwick, chief marketing officer at Pepsi-
Cola North America, spends the biggest chunk of the nearly $20 million that he has allocated to online
advertising (about 5% of his total budget). He's so enamored of Yahoo's \"progressive view of where its
medium is going and willingness to experiment\" that last month he decided to shift his company's twoyear-
old Pepsi Smash music video series from the WB television network to Yahoo. The Internet brings
Pepsi a larger audience of teenagers, he says, enabling them to watch its videos when they want and to
interact with one another and with Pepsi via instant messaging.
Roehm too spends the biggest chunk of her online dollars on Yahoo. She says that Yahoo gives her the
most information about how the advertising performs, allowing her to slice and dice the effectiveness of
every dollar she spends. \"We marketers are much more obligated to tell our shareholders and our
management what the real return on our spending is. Online provides us the opportunity to give a real
answer to that question,\" Roehm says. \"It's measurable. It allows you to have a one-on-one, two-way
dialogue with your customers.\" She knows that almost every dollar she spends online generates $1.50 or
more in sales for Chrysler. Although she doesn't have a comparable figure for her spending on TV or in
print, her gut, says Roehm, tells her online is a lot better.
Not only can Yahoo provide Roehm with extremely detailed demographic information about the people
who click on her ads, it can also predict the probable response rate to the ads on each segment of the
portal. It can predict what time of day the ads are likely to be most effective. And increasingly, by
analyzing \"click streams\" on its network, Yahoo can spot potential buyers at various stages of the
consideration process. In other words, by looking at the billions of user clicks that flow through its servers
every day, Yahoo is getting better and better at figuring out that a given pattern--say, a user who's looked
up football on Yahoo Sports, checked out adventure movies on Yahoo Entertainment, and compared
truck prices on Yahoo Autos --means the browser is interested in buying a Jeep and is just beginning to
think about a purchase. Another pattern might mean a user is interested in minivans and is just a few
days from buying. Such information is hugely valuable, says Roehm: Once Yahoo knows where a
potential customer is in the car-buying process, it can serve up the appropriate Chrysler ad.
As advertisers flock to Yahoo, media companies that supply it with content are increasingly upset. Indeed,
if anything threatens Semel's vision of the 21st century's first media giant, it's the growing irritation of the
giants of the 20th century. That's because Yahoo produces relatively little content of its own--it's an
aggregator vulnerable to being cut off if old media become angry enough.
Old media's worries are legitimate. While declines in TV ratings and newspaper circulation accelerated
last year, Yahoo's traffic, as measured in unique users, grew 24%. The fear that Yahoo will wreck their
business model is especially acute among newspaper and TV-news executives. Yahoo's success \"has
become a red-meat issue,\" says Tom Curley, CEO and president of the Associated Press. \"If there were
an enemies list, [Yahoo] would be front and center.\" Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of the
Washington Post Co., was probably the first to see Yahoo as a rival, says Curley, but now he hears it
regularly from publishers who sit on his board of directors.
It's easy to see why. Just look at Yahoo News, the company's second-most-visited page after Yahoo.com.
Yahoo News attracts 4.6 million visitors a day on average, according to Comscore, about the same
number of people who read the New York Times every day. USA Today, the nation's largest newspaper,
says its readership is 5.6 million. Add in all the people who get their news via Yahoo's myyahoo pages--
which users program for themselves, mixing and matching from a seemingly limitless array of news,
weather, finance, and entertainment feeds--and the number is double that.
Here's what News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch had to say on the subject of Internet news in an address to
editors last spring in Washington, D.C.: \"Unless we awaken to these changes, we will, as an industry, be
relegated to the status of also-rans. We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news
and information have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when
and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.\"
Convincing old media that they will gain rather than lose from doing business with Yahoo is a big reason
Semel hired Lloyd Braun nine months ago; Semel is hoping that just as Millard's roots in magazine
publishing make her a soothing presence on Madison Avenue, Braun's roots in Hollywood will reassure
old media.
The 46-year-old Braun certainly has the charisma to bring anxious media execs to the table. In his
capacious Santa Monica, Calif., office, whose terrace is the size of many New York City apartments, he
ranges around like a pent-up teenager. Dressed with the studied schlumpiness--untucked shirt, spotless
shoes--that is the uniform of Hollywood creative executives, he fiddles with a golf ball and putter, a chair,
and a Magic Marker; he plays Michael Jackson's \"Bad\" from his Yahoo music collection. \"Right after the
trial I downloaded it and started blasting it, and everyone has been loving it,\" he screams over the King of
Pop's familiar sound blaring from the speakers.
Braun is charged with keeping Yahoo's hundreds of millions of users coming back day after day. Don't
mistake his enthusiasm for flightiness: He is one of Hollywood's toughest, most connected operators. A
former entertainment lawyer and talent agent, he has created hit TV shows for more than a decade. At
Brillstein Grey Entertainment he helped develop The Sopranos, and at ABC he was one of the brains
behind Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Grey's Anatomy.
Though he has been been at Yahoo less than a year, Braun has already shaken things up--to the
consternation of some of Yahoo's old guard. Before he came, Yahoo's various sites, like finance, news,
and entertainment, were semiautonomous units largely run as fiefdoms by powerful general managers.
That caused problems. The sites didn't cooperate well, so lots of work was duplicated, and Yahoo had
difficulty dealing coherently with content suppliers. Semel says, \"Even
though sports, news, and
entertainment were licensing things and doing partnerships with the same companies, we did it through
five different voices and five different people.\"
Braun is fusing the fiefdoms into a single unit in the Colorado Center in Santa Monica and requiring
everyone to relocate. Yahoo Finance, which is based in New York City, is moving; so are Yahoo News
and Yahoo Sports, both currently in Sunnyvale, Calif. Braun has also imposed a new layer of centralized
management. He hired Scott Moore from Microsoft's MSN to oversee news and finance, David Katz from
CBS to run sports and entertainment, Shawn Hardin from AOL to run games, and Ira Kurgan from Fox to
focus entirely on making deals for more content. They'll join Dave Goldberg, who has been running music
at Yahoo since it acquired Launch, the music company he co-founded, four years ago. (Three of the eight
old-guard general managers have quit, and three have shifted to other jobs.)
With the new team largely in place, Braun is ready to apply principles of programming from the TV
business to enrich users' Internet experience. The tricky part is doing it so that Yahoo users will still feel
as though they control what they do and see instead of feeling as if they are watching, say, ABC
television. In fact, before Semel approached him about coming to Yahoo, Braun probably would have said
it couldn't be done. \"I remember during the bubble when I was hearing about all these different deals for
television shows on the web and wondering why anybody would want to watch [them] when they could
watch The Simpsons on television. The TV industry has 50 years' experience doing television, and most
of it isn't good enough. How is this business going to all of a sudden do this?\"
The arrival of broadband has expanded the universe of what's possible online, however, like video and
music, enabling Braun to rethink how Yahoo presents content. Asked to detail his strategy, Braun
alternates between coy and expansive (see box), but he is clear about his mission. Yahoo must create a
venue that attracts so many viewers and creates so much buzz that no matter how disconcerted old
media become over Yahoo's growing popularity, the money and attention it delivers to content suppliers
will be too great to resist. \"Aren't they going to want to be at the place where hopefully you're going to find
all these other unique, exclusive, engaging things going on? I think they are,\" he says.
If only it were that easy. Reassuring traditional media companies that he's not out to eat their lunch is still
a big part of Braun's job, and old media have made dozens of moves to assert themselves online. Two
years ago the New York Times pulled its content off Yahoo; it wants readers to visit nytimes.com directly.
Last year Reuters, after 154 years as a wholesaler of news to newspapers, television, and radio, set up
its own news site and put customers, including Yahoo, on notice that it will soon charge more for its
content. More recently, in March, newspaper companies Tribune, Knight Ridder, and Gannett bought 75%
of Topix, an online rival of Yahoo News. \"There's no question that a lot of the other media companies out
there are nervous about [us and wondering], Okay, are they friend or foe?\" says Braun. The problem isn't
that they hate Yahoo, he adds; it's that \"everybody now is feeling this out. There are a lot that we're
talking to about working together. They far outnumber the ones that are saying, 'We want to go it alone.'\"
Braun is willing to resort to old-fashioned incentives to keep his suppliers onboard--like sharing ad
revenues, paying a license fee, or cutting them in on one of the premium services that Yahoo users pay
for, like Yahoo Music. \"Or there could simply be some promotional value that they're getting, which, by the
way, is a great value,\" he says. \"If we're sending a zillion eyeballs, 18- to 34-year-old eyeballs, let's say,
to an older-skewing network, I know how valuable that would have been to me\" when I was at ABC.
Watching Terry Semel surf the broadband wave should be quite a show. He has rescued Yahoo, true, but
nowhere is success more likely to draw a crowd than online. Microsoft, AOL, and even Google are
adjusting their business strategies to better compete. AOL last month said it's moving away from its
subscription-based model and making more of its content available for free. It wants to recapture users
who defected to portals like Yahoo--and the ad revenues that followed them. MSN is building its own
search-advertising business in hope of someday not needing to outsource it to Yahoo as it does now. It is
also working hard to cut ad clutter on its pages and broaden its brand-advertising offering, which is
increasingly competitive with Yahoo's. Google, having built a mammoth franchise on the principle that oldfashioned
cost-per-1,000 advertising--banner ads--has no place online, is now letting advertisers pay for
ads that way. Why? Google insiders believe that as the $150-billion-a-year brand-advertising business
moves online, it would be stupid not to compete.
Yahoo's rivals could also leapfrog it by innovating more fiercely. Though it spends as heavily on product
development and R&D as Google and Microsoft (between 11% and 14% of revenues), both competitors
define themselves as technology companies foremost, while Yahoo does not. Yet for Yahoo, falling
behind in this arms race would spell big trouble.
Perhaps the biggest risk Yahoo faces is living up to the high expectations set by investors. They're not as
stratospheric as those for Google, but by awarding Yahoo a $50 billion market cap and a future P/E of
about 50, investors have priced in 30% revenue growth--that's doable given all the new money heading
Yahoo's way, but it doesn't leave much room for error. For example, although Yahoo reported secondquarter
growth of 39% in the U.S. and 59% abroad, its earnings were a hair below expectations and its
stock immediately fell 10%.
Negotiating in intensely competitive environments, though, is Semel's greatest skill. In Hollywood he was
known as the man who could make even the most intractable deal work. In Silicon Valley he looked like
an odd duck. Just a few years shy of collecting Social Security, he barely knew how to use a computer
when he arrived at Yahoo four years ago. But so what? Yahoo may have started out as a high-tech
company, but it's a media company now.
It turns out that the riddle of how to succeed online isn't so tough after all. Semel is taking everything he
learned in his analog past and marrying it to what he can see in the digital future. After all, he was in
Hollywood when studios worried that VCRs would ruin their business and again when DVDs arrived on
the scene. In each case, the studios' revenues grew, because, says Semel, new distribution options \"help
them reach a much larger audience--and make more money.\" He's betting that can happen again, but
(remember the quote we said required caffeine?) this time on a scale as immense as the Internet itself.
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雅虎绝妙的解决方案
朱莉•罗姆（Julie Roehm）今年有 20 亿多美元
要花。她如何花这笔钱，引起了新闻集团（News
Corp.）、华盛顿邮报公司（Washington Post
Co.），乃至全世界所有媒体公司的担忧。34
罗姆是克莱斯勒公司（Chrysler）的营销传播主
管。她掌管的广告经费在《广告时代》
（Advertising Age）上排名全美第六。她决定著这家汽车
商在全国的电视台和有线电视上做广告时间的长短，以及包括
本刊在内的杂志及《今日美国》（USA Today）这样的报纸
广告页码。
让那些媒体公司担心的是，罗姆一有机会就谈论她对在线广
的兴趣。去年，她把 10% 的广告预算投在了网上，今年的比例
接近 18%。罗姆说，明年她要把这个比例提高到 20% 以上
一下吧: 到 2006 年，克莱斯勒将有近 4 亿美元原本要用在
视、报纸和杂志上的广告费用转投到互联网。“我不喜欢别
说我是网络营销狂，但我们想去有鱼的地方钓鱼啊。”
难怪媒体经理人忧心忡忡。眼下，“Google 热”已经成为
最头疼的问题之一，Google 成功地改造了互联网广告，创
类似分类广告的目标文字链接，如今这种链接广告几乎随处
见。广告的热销，推动 Google 的利润额直线飙升。目前，
Google 的股票市值几乎达到 850 亿美元，它也因此成为全世
界最昂贵的媒体公司。然而，就在保守派人士对 Google 保持
警惕的时候，他们真正感到害怕的却是雅虎公司（Yahoo），
过罗姆这样的广告客户却是越来越喜欢这家公司了。
绝大多数人很容易忽视 CEO 特里•塞梅尔（Terry Semel）
下的这个媒体和广告巨人，塞梅尔四年前离开好莱坞，重组
虎。人们之所以忽视雅虎，一个原因是塞梅尔在刻意躲避公
的注意。他不像苹果公司（Apple）的史蒂夫•乔布斯（Steve
Jobs）那样爱炫耀，也不属于 Google 公司的拉里•佩奇（
Page）或谢尔盖•布林（Sergey Brin）这样的高技术明星。
上，塞梅尔似乎一直表现得平平无奇。且让我们听听他的互
网革命理论: “互联网与之前诞生的所有媒体的最大不同之
就在于，它是有史以来第一个真正实现全球化的媒体，而且
的影响力无与伦比。”听了这话，你是不是想喝点咖啡提提神
了？但是，塞梅尔并不在乎自己的理论有多枯燥。像许多精明
的谈判专家一样，塞梅尔深知，越是喜欢在公众场合高谈阔论
的人，越不可能取得成功。这是塞梅尔在华纳兄弟公司
（Warner Bros）以联合首席执行官的身份做了 20 年电影交易
后所学到的。62 岁的塞梅尔长期扮演著幕后策划人的角色
个胸怀大志的战略家: 他的目标是把雅虎塑造成为 21 世纪
一家媒体巨头。如今，在塞梅尔身边的不是忙于钻研的科学
家，而是广告和媒体行业的资深经理，他们最擅长为有实力的
公司搭建沟通桥梁，而这些公司通常把互联网看作对自己莫大
的威胁。
迄今为止，塞梅尔已打造出了一家最热门的网络公司。1994
年，杨致远（Jerry Yang）和大卫•费罗（David Filo）在加利
福尼亚州桑尼维尔市创建了雅虎，当塞梅尔 2001 年接手这
门户网站的时候，公司已是一团糟。当时，网络公司泡沫已然
破灭，营业额下降了一半，而且公司的财务报表上满是赤字
随著雅虎的创始人退居幕后（如今，杨致远担任公司的愿景
划者，费罗则掌管信息技术），塞梅尔和他的执行人─首席
营官丹•罗森茨维格（Dan Rosenzweig）在雅虎赖以为生的
广告（banner ads）的基础上逐步推行多元化销售战略。塞梅
尔增加了搜索广告、网上分类广告，以及一系列可以带来佣
的业务，如出售 SBC 和 Verizon 的宽带订购服务。这一系列
举措让雅虎扭亏为盈，年营业额达 30 亿美元，预计雅虎今年
的经营利润有望超过 10 亿美元，这个成绩几乎与巨人公司微
软（Microsoft）近 30% 的经营利润率不相上下。（Google
规模与之相当，但经营利润率却几乎是它的两倍。）如今，
虎几乎已经无可争议地成为互联网世界中信息和娱乐产品最
富的网站，它为广告客户提供最完善的网络产品组合。每个
全世界有超过 4.3 亿人经常光顾其众多网站中的一个。
直到前不久，塞梅尔的宏大计划还存在一个重大缺憾: 克莱
勒这样的大型营销客户尚未广泛使用网络广告。这些公司受到
了互联网泡闹 伤害，或是对网络不再抱有幻想，怀疑网络
告能否像商业广告或印刷品广告那样有效。诚然，Google
字广告是一种成功的形式，因为当用户在网上寻找购买对象或
是调查某样东西时，Google 把相关的广告摆在了他面前，
能类似于精明、积极主动的黄页广告。（MSN 和雅虎的搜索
告也采用了这种方式。）但是，利用互联网来推销“百事可
所带来的感觉”，也就是说营造、培养产品品牌所特有的情感
元素，却是完全不同的挑战。绝大多数营销人士对互联网广
能否做到这一点表示怀疑。
但是，罗姆等公司决策者最近开始用一种新的眼光看待互联
网。他们的转变可以用一个词来解释，那就是宽带。目前，
国近三分之一的家庭拥有高速宽带网络接口，它完成了两件
广告客户喜欢的事情。其一，据加利福尼亚州门洛帕克市的
究机构知识网络公司（Knowledge Networks）统计，自 2001
年以来美国人的上网时间平均增加了 50%。该公司表示，目前
美国人浏览各种媒体的时间中，有 15% 用于上网冲浪。[福雷
斯特研究公司（Forrester Research）和许多广告客户表示
这还是比较保守的统计，它们相信，实际数字应该翻一番。
其二，在互联网泡沫时期，广告客户只能局限于使用网幅广
这一种形式，而宽带的普及让它们可以自由采用充满时尚气
和创造力的信息传递方式，这种方式更像电视商业广告。
今年 5 月，弗雷斯特研究公司对 99 个大广告客户和 20
告公司进行了一项调查，结果显示，近 85% 的受访者计划
年扩大网络广告预算。更受人关注的是，该报告称，认为品牌
构建与互联网无法融合的观点已经彻底改变。63% 的受访者
示，作为品牌构建工具，网络广告的作用已经“等同于甚至
于”电视广告或印刷品广告。一个有趣的现象也支持了这一看
法。几乎周周都有大型广告客户宣布，要扩大在互联网上推
其产品的计划，不久前宝洁（P&G）、百事（Pepsi）和
Georgia Pacific 公司也加入了进来。这一趋势表明，一大批
品牌广告将涌向网络世界，到 2010 年，美国互联网品牌广
的年投放额将从目前不足 50 亿美元（约占美国品牌广告投放
总额的 3.5%）增加到 80 亿至 120 亿美元之间，具体数字要
看你所询问的对象。
这可能是塞梅尔和雅虎听到的最好消息了。尽管在年营业额
亿美元的搜索广告市场上 Google 仍然领先，但雅虎的竞争
正与日俱增。在线品牌广告的市场规模与搜索广告市场几乎相
当，在对该领域的争夺战中，雅虎已经做好了抢占市场主导权
的准备。雅虎拥有 1.81 亿注册用户，这很可能是规模最大的
网络顾客群体，也就是说，雅虎可以告诉广告客户，它比其他
任何一家门户网站或传统媒体公司都更了解用户的习惯。
Google 的情况与雅虎恰恰相反，它从未培养过注册用户，
是前不久才开始要求用户注册使用电子邮件或博客服务。此
外，就品牌广告客户最看重的指标─网页浏览量而言，雅虎的
用户最投入。雅虎的网页浏览量（今年 5 月，雅虎在全世界的
网页浏览量为 1.78 亿）几乎是紧随其后的竞争对手 MSN
倍。[据 Comscore Media Metrix 统计，今年 5 月，MSN
页浏览量为 9,600 万，Google 为 6,800 万，而美国在线
（AOL）为 3,900 万（美国在线与《财富》杂志均为时代华纳
的子公司）。] Aquantive 是专做网络投放的规模最大的广
公司之一，公司 CEO 布赖恩 麦克安德鲁斯（Brian
McAndrews）说: “雅虎面临巨大的发展机遇。”尽管雅虎的
络竞争对手也在集结力量，向品牌广告发起冲击，但摩根士丹
利公司（Morgan Stanley）互联网分析师玛丽 米克（Mary
Meeker）却认为，雅虎目前仍掌握著优势: “如果你是初次接
触网络广告（许多大型广告客户正是如此），你首先应该找雅
虎，因为它能提供全方位的服务。”
塞梅尔请来管理雅虎公司品牌广告业务的那位女掌门人，不像
是为技术公司工作的。50 岁的温达 米勒德（Wenda
Millard）是雅虎公司广告销售部负责人，她举首投足都更像
尚杂志的出版人。米勒德强调“吸引”、“取悦”用户的重要
性，强调与广告客户之间的“关系”和“建立信任”。她声
柔和甜美，给人以信任感，特别能打动人。
这也难怪，米勒德 1996 年进入当时实力强大的互联网广告加
工公司 DoubleClick，2001 年转入雅虎，而此前她在杂志行
度过了 20 年光阴。刚入行时，米勒德帮助《仕女居家月刊
（Ladies' Home Journal）和《纽约》（New York）杂志推
广告。38 岁时，她成为《家族》（Family Circle）杂志的出
版人，成了当时业内最年轻的出版人，也是第一位掌管大型
女杂志的女性。她为雅虎工作，但办公地却在纽约，也从不
自己老式媒体的做派感到自卑。实际上，她认为这是她最珍
的财富，其他许多人也这么认为。“当你恳请大客户在某种
媒体上投入数亿美元资金时，它们希望能够信任你。如果我和
《财富》全球 1,000 家大公司的总裁或是这些广告公司负责
没有任何交情，他们怎么会信任我？”
还记得吗，在互联网泡沫时期，包括雅虎在内的各大门户网
都认为，自己将永远保持拥有巨大的需求，完全可以摒弃广
公司，直接通过电子邮件接收广告客户的广告订单。它们把媒
体与广告客户、广告公司间司空见惯的共进午餐、打高尔夫球
看作是浪费时间。当互联网泡沫破灭后，这种傲慢自大的态
让门户网站吃尽了苦头，它们成了麦迪逊大街上不受欢又
人。
米勒德是第一个提出和解的人。受工作经历的影响，她认识
到，广告公司作为大型广告客户的守门人发挥著至关重要的作
用，于是她恢复了与他们的合作关系。
Aquantive 公司的麦克安德鲁斯说，他本人以及其他中介机
因此与米勒德建立了稳固的信任关系。
到了 2003 年，广告客户和代理公司开始对雅虎广泛的影响
力、多样化的广告产品以及对用户的深入了解做出了回应。
今，百事可乐北美地区首席市场营销官戴夫•布尔韦克（Dave
Burwick）为网络广告拨出的预算接近 2,000 万美元（约占其
预算总额的 5%），雅虎得到了其中最大的一笔。雅虎公司
其媒体发展走向所持的进步观点以及不断尝试的勇气”让布
韦克大为著迷，于是他在上个月做出决定，把已做了两年的
Pepsi Smash 音乐电视系列节目从华纳兄弟公司（WB）的电视
台转到雅虎网站上播出。布尔韦克说，互联网为百事公司带
了更多的青少年受众，网络可以让这些观众随时观看百事的
频节目，并且可以通过实时传讯软件互相交流，甚至与百事公
司互动。
罗姆也把最大一笔互联网广告预算拨给了雅虎公司。她说，
虎向她通报了有关广告绩效的大部分信息，以便让她逐一分析
每笔广告开支的效果。“作为市场营销人员，我们有义务向股
东和管理层汇报所有开支的使用效果。网络广告让我们有机
为这个问题找到确切的答案。网络广告的效果是可以量化的
它让你可以与顾客展开一对一的双向交流。”罗姆知道，她
网络广告上为克莱斯勒公司每投入一美元，就几乎能够产生
1.5 美元甚至更多的销售回报。罗姆说，尽管没有电视广告或
印刷品广告的数据可供比较，但她心里非常清楚，网络广告的
效果要更胜一筹。
雅虎不仅能为罗姆提供点击克莱斯勒产品广告的用户的详细统
计信息，还可以预测投放的广告在这家门户网站各个频道可能
产生的回应率。它能预测广告在一天中的什么时间投放可以取
得最佳效果。此外，通过分析网络的“点击流量”，雅虎能
越来越准确地寻找出处在不同决策阶段的潜在买家。换言之
通过观察每天从其服务器上流过的数十亿次点击的变化情况
雅虎越来越善于总结特定的模式，例如某位用户在雅虎体育
道上查寻足球赛事信息，在雅虎娱乐频道上付费收看冒险类电
影，并且在雅虎汽车频道上比较卡车价格，这就说明这位浏览
者有意买辆吉普车，而且只是刚刚开始考虑购车计划。而另
种模式可能意味著用户有意购买小型货车，而且过不了几天就
会出手。罗姆说，这类信息的价值非常高: 一旦雅虎判断出
在顾客处于购车流程的哪个阶段，雅虎就能为克莱斯勒公司安
排适当的广告。
当广告客户一窝蜂拥向雅虎后，为其提供内容的媒体公司开
变得越来越不安了。实际上，如果说塞梅尔创建 21 世纪第一
家媒体巨擘的宏伟构想会受到什么威胁的话，那一定是来自
些 20 世纪的媒体巨头们日渐强烈的愤懑。这是因为雅虎自己
制作的内容相对较少，它只是一个内容集合，传统媒体要是被
惹急了，就有可能切断它的内容源。
传统媒体的担心不无道理。去年，电视收视率和报纸发行量都
出现了加速下滑的局面，雅虎网站的用户访问量却增长了
24%。报纸和电视新闻行业的高层经理尤其感到坐卧不安，
担心雅虎可能摧毁自己的商业模式。美联社（Associated
Press）CEO 兼总裁汤姆•柯利（Tom Curley）说，雅虎的成功
“已经成为一个棘手的问题。如果统计一下我们的敌人，（
虎）将排在最突出的位置上。”华盛顿邮报公司董事长兼
唐纳德•格雷汉姆（Donald Graham）可能是第一个把雅虎视为竞
争对手的人，但柯利说，如今他却经常从担任美联社董事的出
版人那里听到类似的说法。
不难明白个中原因。以雅虎的新闻频道为例，它是雅虎网访问
量排名第二的网页，仅次于雅虎主页。据 Comscore 公司统
计，雅虎新闻频道平均每天有 460 万访问者，与《纽约时报
（New York Times）每日读者数不相上下。美国发行量最大的
报纸《今日美国》称其读者有 560 万。如果把那些使用“
雅虎”（myyahoo）功能的用户（这些用户自己从海量的新
天气、金融和娱乐信息中选取、定制个人所需内容）也统计
内，雅虎的访问者还要翻一番。
今年春天，新闻集团 CEO 鲁珀特•默多克（Rupert Murdoch
华盛顿向他的编辑们发表有关互联网新闻的演讲时不得不说
“除非我们意识到这些变化，否则我们这个行业将沦为失败
者。我们有必要认识到，下一代人在获取新闻和信息时对于他
们将得到什么样的新闻有著不同的预期，其中包括何时获得新
闻，如何获得新闻，在哪里获得新闻，以及由谁为他们提供新
闻。”
说服传统媒体，让它们相信与雅虎打交道将让它们获益而不是
受损，是塞梅尔在九个月前任用劳埃德•布劳恩（Lloyd Braun
的主要原因，就像塞梅尔希望米勒德在杂志出版行业的工作
历能对麦迪逊大街产生安抚作用一样，他希望布劳恩的好莱
工作背景可以让传统媒体感到放心。
46 岁的布劳恩完全具有把焦虑不安的媒体经理召集在一起的人
格魅力。他的宽敞办公室位于加利福尼亚州的圣莫尼卡市，
台和纽约市的许多公寓一样大。布劳恩在办公室里来回踱步
样子就像被关了禁闭的少年。他刻意做出一副随意的装扮─
衫的领口敞开著，脚上的皮鞋一尘不染，这是好莱坞创意经
的典型装束。他一会儿摆弄一下手边的高尔夫球和球杆，一
又转动一下座椅和手中的魔术笔，播放起了雅虎音乐收藏夹
收录的迈克尔•杰克逊（Michael Jackson）的歌曲《真棒》
（Bad）。“对杰克逊的审判结束后，我下载了这首歌曲并
始大声播放，人人都喜爱这首歌曲。”音箱里，杰克逊在高
歌唱，布劳恩不得不扯著嗓子说话。
布劳恩的工作是想方设法吸引雅虎数以亿计的用户日复一日地
光顾雅虎网站。你千万不要以为布劳恩喜欢轻浮，其实他是好
莱坞最难对付、关系最广的经理人。布劳恩以前做过娱乐业
师和演员经纪人，有十多年创作热门电视节目的经历。他曾
助 Brillstein Grey Entertainment 公司创作了《黑道家族
（The Sopranos）; 在美国广播公司（ABC）时，他是电视
剧《欲乱绝情妻》（Desperate Housewives）、《迷失》
（Lost）和《实习医生风云》（Grey's Anatomy）的策划之
一。
尽管布劳恩进入雅虎还不到一年，但他已经引发震动，令雅虎
一些老资格人物感到恐慌。在他进入雅虎之前，雅虎网站的所
有频道如财经、新闻和娱乐均在握有重权的总经理的领导下
处于半自治状态。这种体制产生了许多问题。由于各个频道
缺乏合作，结果导致了大量重复劳动，而且雅虎很难一致地
内容供应商打交道。塞梅尔说: “尽管体育、新闻和娱乐频
都从相同的公司获得许可并建立合作关系，但我们是通过五
不同的人用五种不同的声音来完成这项工作的。”
布劳恩将各自为政的机构合并到圣莫尼卡科罗拉多中心的一
部门里，重新安置了每个人。位于纽约市的雅虎财经频道正在
搬家，雅虎的新闻和体育频道也不例外，目前这两个频道已
转移到了加州的桑尼韦尔。布劳恩还按照集权制的原则组建了
新的管理层。他聘请了微软 MSN 的斯各特•摩尔（Scott
Moore）管理雅虎新闻和财经频道，请来哥伦比亚广播公司
（CBS）的大卫•卡茨（David Katz）掌管体育和娱乐频道，
国在线请来肖恩•哈丁（Shawn Hardin）负责游戏频道，从
斯公司（Fox）请来艾拉 柯根（Ira Kurgan）全权负责内
购，以提高采购数量。他们将与戴夫•戈德伯格（Dave
Goldberg）一起全面接手雅虎的所有网站频道，戈德伯格曾
他人一起创办了一家音乐公司 Launch，四年前雅虎收购了
Launch 之后，戈德伯格一直担任雅虎音乐频道的总经理。（
先的八位总经理中有三位提出辞职，还有三位转至其他部
门。）
新管理团队基本就位后，布劳恩做好了准备，要把从电视行
学到的节目制作经验运用到网站上，以丰富用户的互联网体
验。这一做法的棘手之处在于，要让雅虎的用户觉得仍然可以
控制自己的所做所见，而不会觉得自己是在收看电视节目，
如 ABC 的节目。事实上，在塞梅尔找到他并请他加盟雅虎之
前，布劳恩很可能会说这是不可能的。“记得在网络泡沫期
间，我听说了各种各样把电视节目移植到网络上的交易，当
我一直想，明明可以在电视上看《辛普森一家》（The
Simpsons），为什么还有人愿意在网上收看（它们）。电视
业已有 50 年节目制作历史，其中大部分节目还不够好。互
网行业怎么能在突然之间就宣布要涉足这项业务呢？”
然而，宽带的诞生拓展了网络的发展潜力，例如视频、音乐
内容，这一切让布劳恩重新思考雅虎该如何提供内容。当有人
请布劳恩详细阐述其战略时，他时而保守不语，时而又豪爽健
谈（详情参见附文），但他对自己的使命却非常清楚。雅虎必
须创建一个能够吸引大量访客、能够营造轰动效应的聚会场
所，这样，无论传统媒体对雅虎与日俱增的受欢迎程度怎么
安，雅虎提供的金钱和吸引力都足以让内容供应商无法抗拒
布劳恩说，“他们有可能在这里发现时下所有独具一格、充
魅力的事物，难道他们就不想身处其间吗？我看他们想。”
要是真这么容易就好了。布劳恩目前最重要的任务仍然是要
传统媒体公司放心，认为他并不准备争夺他们的午餐，而传统
媒体公司也采取了几十项措施，以图进入互联网领域。两年
前，《纽约时报》断绝了与雅虎的内容合作关系，希望读者直
接访问公司的网站 nytimes.com。已有 154 年历史的路透社
（Reuters）一直向报纸、电视台和广播电台批发新闻，去年
路透社成立了自己的新闻网站，并且通知雅虎等客户，它很快
将提高新闻服务的价格。就在今年 3 月，Tribune、Knight
Ridder 和 Gannett 三家报业公司联合收购了雅虎新闻频道的
网络竞争对手 Topix 公司 75% 的股份。布劳恩说: “毫无
问，一大批媒体公司（对我们）感到紧张（并且提出质疑）。
他们究竟是友是敌？”他接著说，问题并不在于他们讨厌雅
虎，而是“人人都在试图弄清楚这一情况。我们正与许多公司
洽谈合作事宜。它们的数目远远多于那些主张｀我们要单独
展＇的公司。”
布劳恩乐意采用传统的鼓励手段来挽留内容供应商，例如:
享广告收入，支付许可使用费，或者请它们加盟雅虎盈利丰
的付费服务如雅虎音乐。“或者直接为它们提供市场推广，
便说一句，这个价值可不是小数目。”布劳恩说，当他在
的时候，“如果我们能把无数的眼球即 18 至 34 岁用户的眼
球转移到某个较为传统的网络中去，我就知道这会为我带来
大价值。”
观看塞梅尔在宽带大潮里冲浪，就像看一场精彩的表演。他的
确挽救了雅虎，但没有什么地方取得的成功能够像互联网领
那样引人注目。微软、美国在线，甚至包括 Google 都在调
自己的商业发展战略，以增强自身的竞争力。上个月，美国
线表示，它正在放弃原先以订阅为基础的模式，为用户提供更
多的免费内容。它希望夺回那些投靠雅虎等门户网站的用户
以及跟随他们而去的广告营业额。目前，MSN 的搜索广告业务
仍然分包给雅虎，但它正在筹建自己的搜索广告业务，以期在
不久的将来自立门户。MSN 还在努力消除网页广告中的混乱
面，并丰富其品牌广告的服务内容，在这方面 MSN 对抗雅虎的
能力正与日俱增。Google 曾经按照自己的原则组建了一个
的特许经营网络，把那些采用传统的千次成本（即按照广告出
现 1,000 次来计费，用于条幅广告）来收费的广告挤出了互
网领域，可如今 Google 又同意广告客户按照这种方式交费
了。原因何在？Google 公司的内部人士认为，随著年营业额达
1,500 亿美元的品牌广告业务移师互联网领域，恐怕只有傻
才不会设法参与竞争。
雅虎的竞争对手还可以通过积极创新来超越它。尽管雅虎在
品开发和研发方面的投入与 Google、微软不相上下（大约
业收入的 11% 至 14%），但这两个竞争对手始终把自己定
技术公司，但雅虎却没有。对它而言，在这场“军备竞赛”
落后就意味著有大麻烦。
雅虎的最大风险也是投资者的厚望。尽管这些期望值并不像
Google 那样高，但投资者已经给了雅虎 500 亿美元市值和接
近 50 倍的未来市盈率，为它定了 30% 的营业额增长目标
果新增资金尽得其用，这个目标还是可行的，但雅虎也出现
得太大闪失。例如，根据公司公布的数字，尽管今年第二季度
在美国的增长率为 39%，海外增长率为 59%，但由利润稍低于
预计值，使雅虎的股价立即下跌了 10%。
不过，在激烈的竞争环境下谈判却是塞梅尔的拿手好戏。在好
莱坞，塞梅尔因为可以让几乎失去希望的交易起死回生而闻
遐迩。在硅谷，他是个行事怪异的人。虽然塞梅尔再有几年就
要退休了，但当他四年前刚刚来到雅虎时，他几乎还不会使用
计算机。可那又怎样？雅虎成立之初是家高技术公司，如今
却已转型成为媒体公司。
事实证明，在网络上取得成功还算不上太难。塞梅尔把学到的
一切类似的经验和知识全都用到了他所能预见到的数字未来
中。毕竟，他以前在好莱坞时，电影公司曾担心录像带会毁
电影业，后来又担心 DVD。但电影公司的营业额在这两次都有
所增长，塞梅尔说，这是因为新的分销渠道“帮助它们接触
了更多的观众，并最终赚到了更多的钱”。他坚信这一幕仍
重演，但是（这次还需要咖啡来提神吗？）这次的规模将与
联网本身一样浩大。 |
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发表于 2005-12-27 11:02:47