Yahoo! Inc. is one of the top 5 most visited sites on the web and continues to produce and curate fresh and exciting content in an astonishing number of interest areas. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA and founded in 1994 Yahoo! Inc. has 12,000 employees and serves more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages. “Nowadays the most important thing is to really know who your consumers are, what they value, what matters to them, and what they’re looking for in the future” says David Iudica - Director, Strategic Insights and Research at Yahoo! Inc. With their Vision Critical® Community Panel ‘Yahoo! Yodelers’, Yahoo! Inc. is able to regularly tap into the thoughts and opinions of 15,000 of their consumers in order to make better, more informed decisions.
The Internet has very quickly become a crowded space. Mimicry is amuck, and the emergence of the next sensational web start-up is constantly imminent. This makes it a very exciting and innovative space, but one where differentiation becomes a key success factor. Yahoo! sought a way to provide additional value to advertisers; they established that depth of insight was a way in which to better distinguish themselves from the masses. By hosting a community panel of Yahoo! consumers they could build out a 360 degree view of their customer by learning much more about their offline behaviour “It’s coming straight from their mouth which is really important and it adds a little bit more credibility to what we’re saying” says Iudica.
In a little over a year of launching the community panel the team at Yahoo! had collected over 150,000 survey responses, representing a much greater number of data points, each of which can be matched back to each individual’s profile information captured in the very beginning. Furthermore there has been the qualitative engagements where some of the more unexpected insights have come “We can run some qual, do some ideation with our users, and then we can test those ideas through a larger scale quant sample. So it really gives us the best of both worlds”. Iudica believes that the key to building a successful community panel is engagement. To this point the Yahoo! Yodelers panel uses a blog to keep panelists informed and updated on how the findings are being used. It also hosts online focus groups, screens video content, facilitates mobile video chats “It’s not just an online survey it’s an experience, it’s a real methodology, it’s a rich and robust methodology that you can really dig into and get some serious answers”. Findings from the panel have even been spoken to on the Today Show, as well as published in the Wall Street Journal.
The team at Yahoo!, through their 15,000 member community panel have a tool in which they can extract deeper insights to help their advertising partners to improve the effectiveness of their ad spend. The immediacy of this information and the use of Vision Critical’s cutting-edge methodologies produce a richer, deeper customer perspective. Perhaps best summarized up by Iudica, “What we’ve been able to do through these online focus groups, through the live chats, through the mobile video discussions is get a visual of what people are really thinking. Vision Critical’s capabilities have really helped us to bring that to life with our consumers and with our clients”.