‘Do you Yahoo?’: The monster task of healing the brand that won’t die
Last week Yahoo hired a new chief marketing officer. Josh Line, formerly chief brand guy at Paramount Global, faces one of the toughest gigs imaginable.
The job is to take what is effectively a living fossil and invigorate it. Line must transform Yahoo – a brand synonymous with missed opportunity and decline – into something new and vibrant. He must do that in an environment where even the companies that buried Yahoo two decades ago – Google and Meta – are existentially challenged.
So does Line look back to go forwards? Exactly how much is the right amount of nostalgia? What is the product proposition in a world flooded by AI slop and dominated by the promise of AI agents?
As someone who worked at Y! in the good old days the lack of exclamation marks after the “Yahoo”‘s in this article still triggers me even though it has been more than 20 years.