Yahoo! Project Purple and the concluding head fakes

Came from the Project Purple launch yesterday, an event by Yahoo! and handled by Ogilvy (cat’s out of the bag — Ogilvy now handles Yahoo! Philippines — Gratz!). In a nutshell, the event, hosted by Patty Laurel was a below the line approach to showcase Yahoo! properties, announce tie ups, and showcase local community members within their products. Check out the local Yahoo! Philippines portal for contests and interesting prizes such as purple Krispy Kreme donuts, BlackBerry devices and the grand prize — a spankin’ new Yahoo! Honda Jazz with Wee Will Doodle all over it. Here are more photos from the Ayala Museum.

Event aside, what I found more interesting was the head fake Jojo Anonuevo told me after the camera interview …

And now for the Project Purple headfake. Off camera, Jojo told me that there’s a deeper purpose to all of the hype which was not covered by the event. Project Purple exists to serve as a springboard for online and real world collaborations for advertising and below the line (PR) campaigns. Maybe to the uninitiated, Yahoo! is simple the household name we have for email, Yahoo! Messenger and the news portal. Truth is, their web properties stretch as far as Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Delicious, Jumpcut (oops they dumped Jumpcut — how sad), and Yahoo! Live (eek they shut this down too).

All in all, this is a great campaign to reintroduce traditional advertisers and marketers to the web and what it can do. You’ve probably heard that online advertising is the 4th channel for advertising apart from TV, radio and print (the 5th if you add out of home fabrications). The truth of the matter is that this paradigm of thinking is wrong. The online space is its own self sustaining community with a different set of rules for engagement: you have banner ads, SEO, eCommerce, social media and analytics, advergaming, blog marketing, online video, open social application development, and many more. If you are reading this now and work for an ad agency, ask yourself if you have expertise in any of these tools (btw flash animation is passe — go Javascript because it’s trackable!).

Yahoo! is simply accelerating this education process by using their own web properties, namely Flickr and Yahoo! Answers, both which have a strong Filipino community like this one here (heck, Flickr’s original founder is part Filipina). As a fellow new media advocate, this spells good tidings for future campaigns. Congratulations Jojo and Yahoo! Philippines!