2009 PRO Awards: Yahoo! Start Wearing Purple

Agency: Yahoo!
Client: In-House

In Yahoo!’s “Start Wearing Purple” campaign, the portal mixes together online and offline in a way so elegant that only peanut butter and jelly could understand. The campaign included four aspects that kept the brand’s purple color top of mind — Purple Pedals, in which worldwide bike riders automatically generated 62,000 Flickr photos from the bike’s handlebars (one every 60 seconds the bikes were in motion); Pioneers of Purple, which featured influencers who have done extraordinary things; Purple Pranks, which took hilarious offline gags and posted them online for everyone’s enjoyment; and Purple Products, where a series of exclusive products — such as the Pony Shoe (a purple sneaker), t-shirts or a purple robotic Flash drive — were created and sold on the microsite. Yahoo! also created a mobile access page and custom purple color for My Yahoo! pages.

The combination of the four components was explosive in its ability to drive community and buzz, far exceeding the company’s goal of invigorating the brand. The microsite logged 2 million unique visitors, 232,000 minutes of video streaming, 50 video placements in news media, 64 original news stories and 250 tweets to 118,000 people.