Yahoo is posting their way back into culture
I talked to Kemma Kefalas, Head of Yahoo’s Creative Lab, about relaunching the 30-year-old brand's feeds.
Earlier this year a clever video came across my scroll. The text on screen read “who hired this guy” and showed someone in a meeting typing on a keyboard made entirely of grass. The caption read “When you have a meeting at 1 but gotta touch grass at 1:30.” It had over 500K likes. Then I looked at who posted it. Yahoo? Are they still around?
For the past year, that “Are they still around?” question has been fueling Kemma Kefalas. She’s the Head of Yahoo’s Creative Lab, overseeing @Yahoo brand social channels, creator partnerships, and all social-first brand activations. The Creative Lab’s job is to, in short, reconnect Yahoo to culture. Kemma is a good person to lead that effort—before she joined Yahoo last year, she spent seven years at Dunkin’ as Director of Brand Engagement. The “Short King” campaign? Charli D’Amelio partnership? Little Words Project collab? She worked on all of those.
Since that touch grass video came up on my feed, I can’t seem to escape posts from Yahoo. They actually sold that grass keyboard on April Fools, made a very good joke about a “spam folder”, partnered with that crunchy leaf influencer all over your FYP, and just teamed up with Graza on “keyboard oil” for loud typers. Their social presence feels like a meme page about the internet. Below Kemma and I talk about relaunching Yahoo’s feeds, treating every post like it’s a first impression, and always asking “will they care, will they share?”.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rachel Karten: It’s clear Yahoo went through a bit of a social revamp a year or so ago. Can you talk to me a bit about what that looked like?
Kemma Kefalas: Absolutely. The entire Creative Lab team is less than two years old in Yahoo land. We got started and went straight to work—taking over feeds that were nearly dormant, removing all content, clearing out bot followers, and rebuilding a strategy (and team) from the ground up. We relaunched the feeds with a Yodeling Rooster and the rest is history.
In the beginning our comments were flooded with “Yahoo still exists??” and slowly but surely that tide has shifted to “I can’t believe this is from Yahoo!” or “wait I love that this is from Yahoo.” People have more to say to us in general: comments on Yahoo’s Instagram have increased nearly 800% on average since last June. It’s been fun to connect with the audience who has been there all along and reintroduce the brand to a new set of followers who may be new in the last two years.
RK: How would you describe Yahoo’s approach to social?
KK: We’re really focused on making sure the story always leads back to something authentic about how people use tech every day. After all we are Yahoo and people come to us to get things done each and every day.
We approach social much like the broader Yahoo brand in that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The internet can be a wild place, especially right now. We love sharing relatable moments around our products, but we always aim to be self-aware. We’re the internet talking about the internet. I’d like to consider us a tech brand with personality.
RK: What’s so charming about Yahoo’s social is that it sort of plays with the nostalgia that people have about the brand. It’s not afraid to reference that perception and truth. Can you talk about how you utilize that tension in your strategy?
KK: Nostalgia is something not every brand gets the luxury to play with. Yahoo’s been around for 30 years, and we embrace everything that comes with that. We love nodding to the Yahoo of old—whether it’s through throwback static UI posts, trolling haters in the comments, or poking a little fun at ourselves with lines like “and here we have someone who’s had the same Yahoo email since 1998.”
A lot of folks have grown up with Yahoo, and that’s something we’re proud of—but we also want to show them why we still deserve a spot in their future, too.
RK: I’m curious if there are any analytics you find really useful to look at to determine social success?
KK: Like many brands, we’re really focused on “will they care, will they share?” and that’s often our guiding principle. Shares are every social media marketer’s favorite metric, and I’m a big believer in it. If someone shares your post it’s going to a minimum of one other set of eyeballs. They liked that content enough to either send it to their group chat or post to their own story. The level of flattery that comes with that isn’t lost on me!
When I saw that 559K people shared the Horse Mouse we created with Pablo Rochat, I thought we were onto something. And when we launched an infomercial for a yodel button and it sold out in TikTok shop in just two hours…I knew we were on to something. And we’ve kept experimenting and building from there.
RK: Have you noticed an impact on the product side from the engaging social presence?
KK: A subset of our team is laser focused on what we call Social Activations. To us, these are more integrated campaigns—whether across the company (like our Super Bowl campaign), partnering with another brand or social channel (like a mini Igloo phone cooler), or having a leveled up production (like the Reply All Is Scary Halloween short film we just launched).
We recently did a collab with Anti Social Social Club over the summer. We were their first partner to fully take over their naming structure, changing it to Anti Email Email Club—and we really went for it in terms of self-awareness. An email provider being “anti email” (email that feels like work, that is!) is truly so fun.
We tied this collab to the launch of a Yahoo Mail feature called “catch up” and created a video starring comedian Morgan Jay. The next day Yahoo Mail iOS mobile app hit the highest number of users in a single day in 30 years…coincidence? Something that started from the social team became so much bigger than the sum of its parts.
RK: What role does boosting play in your social strategy?
KK: Boosting can help put content in front of a new audience that otherwise may not have seen it. But a view doesn’t equal an engagement or a follow. Only good content that resonates with the viewer can do that.
RK: What’s a recent post you loved? Why did it work?
KK: A recent trend (as you know!) was the chaos “I love AI” posts. We wanted to do our own spin on it and posted an I Love Emails post instead. It’s now our most shared static IG of all time. I love this because it really proves that to hop on a trend you don’t always have to do it exactly the way it exists.
I am also personally so deeply obsessed with JAWSH. He is a ray of sunshine in my day and is everything that is right in this world. He’s risen to virality recently and talks a ton about the weather—how amazing a cool crispy fall morning is, the feeling of a cup of hot coffee on the porch, etc. We tapped him in record speed to do a quick plug for Yahoo Weather baked into a piece of insanely shareable content. We were his first brand partnership and he was a delight to work with. The video amassed over 600K views and over 600 comments across IG and TikTok.
Never in my career did I expect to be the first brand to sponsor a leaf crunch. But, IYKYK, the amazing creator @leafeveryday appeared out of nowhere, rating the crunches of leaves. We hopped into the comments, immediately getting in touch to, in fact, sponsor a leaf crunch. We only learned via your newsletter (!) that Loewe sponsored her next. So proud of the team for moving quickly on the crunchy leaves!
RK: I think Yahoo really understands how to make a post shareable. Are there any rules or tips you have for increasing the shareability?
KK: I think two things really lend to shareability: giving people a “that’s so me” feeling and/or hit them with shock value to stop their scroll. We like to play around with both. Think: opening a folder to find a bunch of spam, washing a laptop in the sink because clearing out your inbox just didn’t cut it, or using wayyyy too many exclamation points in emails.
RK: I’d love to hear a little bit about your personal philosophy when it comes to social media. How would you sum it up?
KK: Social media is often the first place people encounter a brand—maybe even the first time they’re interacting with us at all. That’s a big deal, and we don’t take it lightly. Every post is a potential first impression, so we want to make sure it’s a good one. If something isn’t clicking for us internally while we’re working through ideas, we just don’t post it. Simple as that. I want each and every post someone stumbles upon to give them at minimum a chuckle, or else it wasn’t worth it.
RK: What do you love about working in social media?
KK: Man, I love working in social media. There are so few jobs where your work is shot out into the public at the same clip as social. Your wins, your losses, your flubs, all out there for the world to see and either celebrate, ignore, or pick apart. The feeling when a post really just HITS is unmatched (and I brought two kids into this world!) and we’re constantly chasing that feeling. It’s also such a public place to get picked apart so it’s important to compartmentalize. A win is a win, a loss is a loss, keep on moving.
What I’m scrolling
If you sort Red Lobster’s TikToks by most popular, they almost all feature CEO Damola Adamolekun. Now he’s appearing in influencer TikToks, like this one with Yahné Coleman. Many of the comments are some version of “Wait a damn minute. What is my man doing with you? 🧐”
TikTok will let you choose how much AI-generated content you want to see. “Manage Topics already enables people to adjust how often they see content related to over 10 categories like Dance, Sports, and Food & Drinks. Like those controls, the AIGC setting is intended to help people tailor the diverse range of content in their feed, rather than removing or replacing content in feeds entirely.”
I wonder if Marty Supreme and A24 gave their trailer footage to clippers. This TikTok has 4M views. A top comment reads, “How is there an edit of a movie that ain’t even out yet.”
And yes, I saw the Timothée Chalamet Marty Supreme Zoom video. Goodyear Blimp’s post in reaction to it is one of their most-liked of all time.
Sky Sports shut down its female-focused TikTok account, Halo, after just three days. The Verge reports, “Halo didn’t focus on women’s sports, nor did it seem to be doing a good job of elevating female voices in a male-dominated business. Instead, it slapped pink sparkly letters on videos, talked about ‘hot girl walks,’ matcha, and posted shipping memes.” Yikes.
Everyone is genuinely reaching a flow state. It’s a brand-safe trend that accounts like Life360, Team Coco, and The Democrats have participated in.
Pierce Abernathy’s cookbook announcement video features the food FYP cinematic universe. Like Emily Sundberg pointed out, it looks like a movie trailer.
I loved Dunkin’s animated short on the legend of Munchkins. I recently wrote about brands making content inspired by kids’ shows and this is a great example of that.
This is now my most-read essay I’ve written on Substack. Thank you for all of the kind feedback on it!
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THAT'S MY FRIEND!!!!!!!
I blogged for Yahoo! waaaaay back in the late 1990s. I'm marinating in nostalgia after reading the Kemma Kefalas interview. Thanks for that!