The launch of the newest Yahoo Mail app was an enormous project with global reach. Our brief was to bring awareness to new app features while also reestablishing Yahoo Mail as a modern brand. The challenge was that people don’t think about email, because email = yawn. Great features like one-tap unsubscribe, top-of-inbox package tracking, and receipts view were built to help you tackle all the life stuff. But what does ‘life stuff’ look like?
We heard from consumers that returning an online purchase could spiral into a part-time job sifting for the receipt (no thank you). Or the frustration of missing the ‘pajama day’ school announcement because your inbox is filled with 600 “biggest sales of the year”. And after all the researching and hesitation, you finally ordered the perfect gift for your mom, only to have porch pirates nab it before you get home.
They were over it and we were over it too, because we have life-stuff too, duh.
Our objective was to create a campaign that brought new life to Yahoo Mail using these oh-so relatable moments of frustration.
Stolen packages. Forgotten permission slips. Lost receipts.
These are the small but fierce enemies of our time. The newly updated Yahoo Mail app gives you the tools to take on the time-wasters and money-grabbers. You win, they lose. The new Yahoo Mail digital campaign, Defeat life’s big little annoyances, celebrated conquering life’s frustrating little tasks with convenient features like one-tap unsubscribe, automatic package tracking or receipts view. The battles are small, but the triumph feels huge.
We executed our concept across a full funnel campaign to reestablish relevance, proving Yahoo Mail isn’t just your grandmother’s email anymore. Once we captured attention with relatable and benefit driven awareness ads, we proved the product’s usefulness in consumer’s day-to-day lives with feature driven conversion marketing. It was important that the whole campaign from high-level emotional appeal ads to feature-oriented marketing spoke in the same tone and voice to build recognition and maintain strength as we retargeted users through the marketing funnel.
We created 4 awareness spots bringing daily villains to life—a porch pirate, a spam salesman, and an air fryer purchase that needs to go. These were supported by vibrant digital and social ads with bold personality in lines like “Give promo emails the finger” or “The antidote to drunk shopping.”
This Yahoo campaign was proudly led by women across copywriting, design, production and product marketing. For the commercials, we partnered with the award-winning director and SNL favorite Adriana Robles and her women-led team of producers and editors. Diversity and inclusion were chief among our team's considerations, from scripting to casting. Having women lead the conversation was key to ensuring our one-night air fryer fling was hilariously spot on while avoiding cringe tropes.
The Yahoo Mail paid media campaign has driven 777M impressions, 12M clicks, and 1.3M installs with +15% return on investment. The app has been installed a total of 9 million times since campaign launch. The campaign resulted in a +3.7% lift in unaided brand awareness and an initial +3.2% lift in consideration intent. On Meta, we’re seeing 2.8% lift in consideration intent for the overall audience campaign-to-date.
