Henrique de Castro of Yahoo

Good message, poor communication

Last week there were tons of stories about Henrique de Castro being fired as COO of Yahoo ($50M+ golden parachute — nice!).

The most interesting story to me was titled “The Only Video You Need To See To Understand Why Marissa Mayer Fired Her COO” http://www.businessinsider.com/de-castro--2014-1#ixzz2qzNjhuGr.

When people say things like “It's a disaster. The worst executive presentation of all time in my opinion, and not just because of the language barrier. People joke about how terrible it is”, I felt compelled to watch the video, how could I resist? (Yes, people really said this, read the article above!) My expectations were that it was going to be a total crash and burn presentation.

After watching it I came away thinking not a total crash & burn; instead I thought good message, poor communication. Yes, Henrique didn’t convey his company’s message very well, which is a complete No-No for someone in his position, especially on a major stage like the IAB.

But the underlying message in his IAB presentation is sound — highly personalized custom content will make personalized ads that much more effective.

The new Yahoo, as I understand it, is all about custom content (Katie Couric news programs for example http://news.yahoo.com/katie-couric-anchor-news-program-yahoo-172850144--finance.html). Creating compelling content will bring in more audience, who will stay longer.

Then by better personalizing the content, Yahoo can increase audience and engagement even more.

Personalizing ads is just the icing on the cake.

What Henrique needed to say at IAB was “Compelling, custom content + content personalization + personalized ads = maximum uplift. And Yahoo can provide that uplift at scale — to more consumers than anyone else.” That’s a great vision for the biggest advertisers who need that scale and demand more and more uplift.

If Yahoo can deliver on this vision, I believe their turnaround will be complete.