Yahoo Buys Full Page Front Page Ad in TOI

India’s largest English-language newspaper, the Times of India, has an interesting print edition front page today – a huge yellow advertisement for Yahoo’s It’s You campaign first announced last month. You can view the print version here.

The newspaper’s circulation as of 2008 was 3.14 million, making it the largest selling English-language daily newspaper (here’s the whole list). Yahoo already has a large presence in India, reaching 26 million of the 35 million online Indians (according to Comscore, August 2009).

What does the ad mean? Who cares. It’s big and yellow. Yahoo has said it hopes to follow up on the ads by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user.

Yahoo Will Spend More Than $100 Million To Try To Connect With You

Yahoo unveiled a new branding campaign at a press conference in New York City, centered around personalization and connecting directly with consumers. The Web company’s new tagline is, “It’s Y!ou” (with the awkward Yahoo exclamation point in there). Yahoo wants to make the Web personal and it is emphasizing the various ways it does that through the Yahoo home page, search, and individual properties. The company will be spending “more than $100 million” on this new branding campaign, CEO Carol Bartz reveals.

Yahoo is so big that the only way it can speak directly to individuals is to make the message more about them than about Yahoo. Other slogans in the new campaign include “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.” Just sticking the word “you” in an ad doesn’t make it any less generic, but Yahoo hopes to follow up on this promise by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user. This extends to search, which rolled out a number of new features more broadly which were previously being tested (including SearchAssist, and enhanced results from SearchMonkey).