On Monday, the company launched a site promoting videos shot by film students, and asked the general public to join in with their own video submissions. The short videos are meant to highlight the redesign of Yahoo's home page and to illustrate the theme "Yahoo has changed."
Yahoo and its ad agency asked film students from the Parsons School of Design, the San Francisco Art Institute, Yale University, and the London Film Academy to submit the videos. The ad agency provided the students with a choice of film scripts based on the theme. The student videos are being shown on the Yahoo Network, ComedyCentral.com, E Online, MTV.com, TheOnion.com and VH1.com.
Yahoo hopes to soon air user-created videos online as well as part of the campaign, said Meagan Busath, a Yahoo spokeswoman. "We are really excited to involve our users in the launch of the Yahoo home page," she said. The company thinks that a lot of creative and funny videos are going to come out of this campaign, she added.
The publicity campaign coincides with the launch of Yahoo's new home page, which will be available to all users in the U.S. in the coming weeks. The new look and functions also have been extended to users in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Vietnam, the U.K. and Ireland. Busath said the company is planning to add more to that list.
Yahoo has indeed been changing. The new Yahoo home page supports IE 7 and Opera, and will support Firefox 2.0 when it launches, according to Busath. On Monday, the company relaunched Yahoo Finance to include interactive charts, new message boards and video clips of finance news from its partners.
Last week, Yahoo and Microsoft released a beta test version of a service that will allow Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger to interoperate. Yahoo also has launched an Internet video review show called "The 9."
