Memo to Carol Bartz: Yahoo Is a Media Company

Given how things have been going lately at Yahoo, it’s not all that surprising that the company reached for a technology executive, former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, to lead the company following the underwhelming tenure of former CEO and founder Jerry Yang. But that doesn’t mean it was the right move.

Throughout Yahoo’s history as one of the Internet’s leading media properties, its management positioning has been a case of yin, and, yes, yang. If the company is smart, this go-round it will embrace the yin. What in hell do I mean by that?  Bartz will do better to think of Yahoo as a media company with a strong technological back-end rather than the reverse. Although, of course, Yahoo is a tech start-up straight out of Silicon Valley, many of its best moments have come when it embraced the fact it is a great media property, delivering great media experiences to consumers, and selling ads to an advertiser base which craves online properties that deliver the audiences they are losing in traditional media. Witness the turnaround earlier this decade engineered by former Warner Bros. exec Terry Semel, and former magazine execs Wenda Harris Millard and Greg Coleman.

Of course, things have changed since then, and it’s not as though Yahoo can simply duplicate the blueprint it adopted the last time it needed a turnaround and succeed again. However, it’s important to remember how much things haven’t changed with the big advertisers that Yahoo, and its competitors, want to court: they are still looking for properties that can build brands, which big media properties like Yahoo can deliver. As marketing services revenue made up almost 90 percent of Yahoo revenue in the last quarter, that matters. In fact, having failed to out-algorithm Google in search, it now matters even more.

I’m not alone in this criticism. Rob Norman, the outspoken CEO of Group M Interaction, told Ad Age yesterday:

My view, as it’s always been, is that Yahoo has pretty much the biggest potential reach as a brand builder of all of the digital-media platforms. But they’ve been somewhat obsessed with Google and advertising as a math problem. They should concentrate on their brand-building assets.

Bartz is said to be out visiting customers (funny, most media properties would refer to them as advertisers) today. Let’s hope she’s listens hard.