Name: How Marissa Mayer measures Katie Couric's ROI
Uploaded: 2015-05-19
Duration: 4 min 31 s
Description: Yahoo's CEO explains what her long-term plan was when she brought on the TV news anchor.

You've made some very high profile hires, including one high profile. Katie, just stand up, please. Katie Couric, just stand up. [ APPLAUSE ] You're [ LAUGH ] So those of you who have visited us from across the world Some of you may not be that familiar with Katie Couric, but Katie was the queen of television news. And spent many years at NBC and then went to CBS and Has had just the career that we all dream of. And last summer when Marisa hired Katie to come to Yahoo! to be a global anchor, people both said, huh? [ LAUGH ] And people said, wow. Maybe the internet is the new television. So why did you hire Katie and how do you [ LAUGHS ] How do you measure Katie's return on investment? I think that it was interesting cause actually the way that I Well one of the things when I first arrived, it was really important to me that we started to raise the quality of content on Yahoo! and I also wanted us to be able to create some of our own original content because otherwise we're just republishing other publishing partners, and that's good, but it doesn't give you a voice And doesn't necessarily differentiate you. And so, we have been working really hard to raise that journalistic standard, raise the quality bar of our content. And I have been thinking about how to do that, and then Candy was kind enough to actually come and speak at, we had a summit in CMOs. And so And I got to interview her. I did a terrible job. And at the end, last question, I said, what's next Katie Couric? And she said, well, I think I've always been a big fan of digital. I've always wanted to work in digital. And I was like oh, thank you, Katie. Thank you. Our advertisers laughed it up and I was like it's great. This is exactly what our VCMO's need to hear. But I just thought, frankly, it was just Katie being polite in terms of what she might wanna do next, paying a compliment to the internet, and so as we walked off stage, I said, Thank you so much for that. That was amazing. The CMOs are really happy. I'm really happy, but on your last questions on the last answer, should we talk? And, and Katie said yeah we should talk. And, and you know we sort of started to look at, you know the platform for the internet is huge. And you know it's, it's different than broadcast television, but there's such an opportunity there to Be on a different schedule to focus more on quality, to take more risks. And I think Katie could talk more about this, but we've been so tremendously happy with the quality of the content. The gets are, I think, as big as primetime interviews. If not, sometimes, in some cases, bigger. We get to break a lot of interesting news and viewpoints, and I've been really happy with it. But- Very seriously though, how do you measure the return? This is a big investment. The- [ LAUGH ] From what I read. But how do you measure the- You can easily measure. You can do things like measure the ads that you've sold against those programs and the follow- on views. And by all means it's a very profitable and good investment that we made. [ LAUGH ] But I will say. Good, good. To me, it was really more about raising that journalistic standard, getting our name out there as People who really want to participate in news and participate in the dialogue in a different way than just republishing content. And because part of Maven's is the v, right? Video. And we could tell that people wanted to consume more and more content on video, both on the web as well as on mobile. And so we really Excited, and I also think when I look across the different digital players, one of the things that has set Yahoo apart over the ages is a personality and a view point. There is a lot of other places where, you know, there's just less personality. Or it's the personality of your friends, or it's different for each person. But, Yahoo very early in our history started working a lot on creating content, organizing content, not being afraid to entertain and inform and it felt right to build on that part of the legacy. Mm hm

Yahoo's CEO explains what her long-term plan was when she brought on the TV news anchor.