My friend Vijay Krishna wrote about Yahoo’s new strategy of using Malaika Arora to advertise the Indian avatar of its mail service. His opinion is that this is a desperate and useless move. I’m fully qualified to join him in the I-know-nothing-about-advertising club, but my thoughts differ in this matter.
While it’s absolutely right that a product will succeed only on the merit of it’s quality and not on the popularity of the star who endorses it, that is not exactly the issue here.
In the first place, we should seek to know if an online mail service is such a valuable commodity to be advertised
Well, in Yahoo’s case it most definitely is. Companies like Google and Yahoo! are surviving, rather thriving from advertising revenue. That is their main source of income. In a recent quarter Yahoo’s profits jumped 500%, advertising being the main contributor. I don’t know how much advertising in e-mail contributed to this, but with hundreds of millions of users it must have been substantial. So, in effect, more people using your mail service = more revenues for Yahoo!
Have you used Gmail? Seen the ticker that increases the size of the mailbox each second? That’s what the future’s about.
Without a doubt, Gmail is the best webmail system right now. But the problem is that many people just don’t get it. I’ve tried to get people to switch, but the effort has been largely unsuccessful. “But, even Rediff and Yahoo! provide 1 GB of space”, is the most popular answer. No amount of glorifying the labels, conversation view, Google search for your mail etc. seems to do the trick. This I think is a problem endemic to places like our country where the internet isn’t a very big part of most peoples lives, and the true value of services like Gmail are lost out. That is where the likes of Yahoo! step in. If Shah Rukh Khan can convince people that the Santro is a better car, shouldn’t the same imaginary expertise and persuasive powers extend to Malaika Arora? I’ve never understood how having famous people endorse a product which they know absolutely nothing about actually helps. Maybe the pseudo recommendation from someone who has a larger than life persona, who they know only virtually, works at some level. But the issue here is, if that kind of advertising can get more and more people to sign up, why should anything else matter? As far I understand, it’s all about the numbers in this game. The more users each service provider has, the more they can leverage the user base to sell advertising. That seems to be the biggest problem for Google now, no substantial registered user base. That’s the reason they’ve been launching a slew of products that require registration. This becomes especially important in a country like India, where the internet usage is growing fast. Get as many users hooked as early as possible, and if a little eye candy works, why not?
By the way, Gmail will have competition soon, when Yahoo! upgrades it’s e-mail service with the technology it acquired from Oddpost. That should be interesting.