Do you Yahoo? How the 30-year-old internet brand is reimagining its voice

Long before irreverent brand voices became ubiquitous (and, in some cases, got very, very weird), there was a time when tone could truly differentiate a brand.

That’s been on Yahoo CMO Josh Line’s mind as he’s been working on refreshing and modernizing the identity of the 30-year-old company.

“The brand voice of Yahoo has always been incredibly unique, totally distinctive in the tech space,” Line told Marketing Brew at CES, noting past breakthrough brand moments like its 2002 Super Bowl spot featuring a talking dolphin, or its (formerly) longstanding dot-com-era billboard as representative of the brand’s “funny, wacky, self-aware sense of humor.”

Rather than working from scratch to reimagine Yahoo’s brand altogether, Line sees its history as a brand that doesn’t take itself too seriously as an asset for the future. “We’re very focused on bringing that forward and translating that,” he said.

Part of the modernization process involves not only figuring out the tone for the brand, both online and off, , but what past elements—like the Yahoo yodel, its bright purple brand mark, and “Do you Yahoo?” tagline—to bring forward for today’s audiences.

Yahoo isn’t alone in looking back to look forward. Marketers for brands like Columbia Sportswear, Gushers, Pringles, and Acuvue, to name a few, have been digging into their brand archives for inspiration in a nostalgia-obsessed world.

Let me reintroduce myself

To reintroduce the brand’s voice on social media, Yahoo first wiped its social channels clean in April 2024. Then, in June that same year, the company used a single post of a rooster paired with the brand’s yodel, and a simple caption: “Hello.”

“The yodel is one of those iconic brand assets that I think you can expect to see us continuing to leverage, because it’s just a really fun, pure expression of the brand,” Line said.

After that first post, Yahoo’s marketing team took a test-and-learn approach to the first six months of its rebooted social media, thinking through what the social strategy should be for an internet brand in today’s world, Line explained. That can be harder than it sounds.

“There aren’t really good models for that,” he said. “There’s lots of great brands on social, but they’re not necessarily tech brands.”

Yahoo’s marketing team landed on “wanting to shine a light on the good pockets of the internet,” Line said. That ethos has led Yahoo to seek out perhaps unexpected partnerships, including with social-forward brands like Liquid Death (adding life-and-death stakes to fantasy football with the threat of a guillotine), Graza (selling “keyboard oil” for loud typers), and Anti Social Social Club (merch for an anti-email club), as well as silly stunts like a grass keyboard for April Fools’

Beyond social

The brand voice and the partnerships aren’t designed to be weird for the sake of being weird, Line said, but were rather aimed at finding ways to convey what Yahoo has to offer to today’s consumers who might not have as much history with the brand.

Yahoo’s holiday campaign, starring TV personality Dylan Efron as a jacked Santa, is one example of this approach. The spots, which feature a shirtless Efron and lots of Christmas and workout puns, are absurd and in line with Yahoo’s brand tone, but also clearly spell out the utility of Yahoo’s product tracking email feature.

Rolling out campaigns like the holiday work with Efron or last year’s regional Super Bowl spot with Bill Murray are part of a push for Yahoo to move beyond social and communicate brand resurgence, something that will only continue into 2026.

This year, “you can expect a real step change in our marketing,” Line said. “2025 was us beginning to get back out there. And I think, in 2026, you will see us out there with a real cadence of bigger swings.”