To showcase the power of the collective knowledge of Yahoo!’s millions of users, Yahoo! created a unique integrated campaign, titled “Ask the Planet” to drive significant awareness and trial of the new Yahoo! Answers utilizing untraditional online advertising methods. Yahoo! leveraged its vast network that reaches 500 million users worldwide through email, video, front page advertisement as well as banner/text advertisements throughout numerous Yahoo! services. On and off-network advertisements added to the campaign’s success driving 25% over goal on referrals, over 30% lift in daily traffic and increased new user conversion by 32%, delivering a 77% ROI.

To showcase the power of the collective knowledge of Yahoo!’s millions of users, Yahoo! created a unique promotion, titled “Ask the Planet”, which invited consumers to help answer the world’s biggest questions. To bring this online program to life offline, Yahoo! built the “World’s Biggest Brain,” a two-story brain-shaped terrarium perched atop New York’s Times Square, which housed 25 Yahoo! Answers users for 72 consecutive hours. The three-day event was webcast worldwide, showcasing visits from various celebrities including Deepak Chopra, Russell Simmons, chef Todd English, and others, who visited the Brain to share knowledge from their own areas of expertise.

Ask the Planet 2006 was the first consumer campaign to support Yahoo!’s vision to enable users to Find, Use, Share and Expand all human knowledge. The campaign drove 25% over goal on referrals, over 30% lift in daily traffic, increased new user conversion by 32% over pre-campaign and delivered a 77% ROI.

Microsite: • 303,432 unique visitors • 735,474 page views • 163,062 video streams of event Results: • PR generated 130 million media impressions • During the promotion, Yahoo! Answers received 79% more page views • Over 74,000 people entered the promotion between June 13th – July 7th