CANNES — You don’t need to be an art major to understand the challenges facing Yahoo! Chief Executive Marissa Mayer.
Mayer attempted to use some obscure artworks to illustrate the company’s approach to advertising — but ended up creating mostly confusion during a presentation to Madison Avenue on Tuesday.
One art installation was a giant piece of twisted glass set among a series of aloe plants. It wasn’t clear if it was supposed to be an analogy for “native advertising,” a newfangled term for advertiser-sponsored content, or something else.
Mayer, who sits on the boards of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Design Museum, also extolled the audience of ad execs at the Cannes Lions festival to see themselves as artists.
“Art is advertising and advertising is art,” said the former top Google executive who was clad in an electric blue dress with cutouts.
In the same way a picture is limited by the frame, Mayer said mobile is a constraint for advertisers and content providers struggling to keep things simple on the small screen.
During her time at Google, Mayer was the company’s chief advocate for keeping product design clean and simple.
Mayer has been struggling to turn around Yahoo’s slumping ad business since she was hired away from the search giant in July 2012. So far, her biggest moves have been acquisitions, including a $1 billion deal for micro-blogging platform Tumblr.
While Yahoo is still a work in progress, Mayer showed some promising examples of the ways in which corporations have harnessed the power of Tumblr:
- Film studio Lionsgate created a magazine to show off clothing from “The Hunger Games.”
- General Electric created a page to illustrate the science of squeezing things.
- General Mills set up a cartoon-themed page for cereal character Buzz the Bee.