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I recently read a book from Randy Pausch who was famous for writing “The Last Lecture”. If you haven’t heard about him, he was a Professor at Carnagie Mellon who died of cancer. Before he did, he gave a last lecture about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. (Video link below).

It talks about life and his take on how you approach it. It has some good points, I would actually recommend watching the video as it has most of what the book has. It is over 1 hour long but is entertaining, insightful and worth it.

I have taken a few pointers from it, and one that I found interesting was to “Play Without The Ball”. Randy was a football player whose coach told him to “play without the ball”, meaning, there is only one ball, not everyone can have it, learn to play your game and things will happen. I have used this myself to great success, you just have to have patience and discipline. Sometimes you won’t even see the results, you just know it’s there.

Recently, Google killed the deal to present their ads on Yahoo’s network. They were trying to get approvals first to eliminate Yahoo’s Search Marketing and take all PPC ads. There were competition issues, so they adjusted it to a limited percentage of their ad service and were in the process of trying to get through regulators.

In a email from Yahoo regarding the failed deal from Hilary Schneider Executive Vice President, Yahoo! U.S. :

“As you know, Yahoo! has long focused on how to improve the user, advertiser and publisher experience. We will continue to enable you to easily connect with the consumers you most want to reach, by creating a more open, efficient and effective marketplace for advertisers and publishers. We also plan to continue to provide the cutting-edge advances in products, platforms and services that the industry needs and expects, by leading the way in helping advertisers navigate the converging contextual and search ad markets. Finally, we remain committed to innovation in anticipating the needs of Yahoo!’s audiences–one of the largest and most engaged populations of consumers on the web–by creating the unique context that delivers results for brand advertisers online.

In short, even in the absence of a commercial agreement with Google, we intend to become an ever-stronger player in online advertising. Our certainty on this front comes from the progress we continue to make in many areas, not the least of which are the significant innovations we’re making in search.”

To me they talk about being strong innovators and advertisers, but if they were so confident, why would they want a deal with Google? I don’t want to see Google get their space, as it would drive up ad costs and reduce competition.

But what I see Google doing, is that they are playing without the ball. Yahoo has had trouble with staff departures and reported dissention in the ranks. Once you lose good people, you are in trouble.

Their failed deal with Microsoft, plummeting stock price, erosion in ad inventory vs. Google’s innovation in almost everything, I think Google is going to let Yahoo go down even further. Just let the market take care of them. Why give them a boost with ad revenue when Google will get it anyways? They don’t need the ball.

Tags: advertising, google, randy pausch, the last lecture, yahoo

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Market Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.