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Yahoo continues to pull out all the stops in hopes of convincing investors and advertisers that even though it's a massive media and technology company today, it has a plan for the future.

"Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in a meeting with financial analysts at Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren't so shiny anymore."

The all-day meeting, which is being Webcast, is designed to reconnect Yahoo with the financial community, something Bartz hinted earlier this year was long overdue in comments she made in New York. Ever since former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang turned down a $33 per share offer from Microsoft in 2008, Yahoo's stock has languished at about half that value, and with the economy taking a turn for the worse, even a tepid recovery has been seen as welcome news.

Bartz brought a team of Yahoo leaders up on stage to show off what they've been doing to take better advantage of Yahoo's enormous reach across the Internet. For example, Tapan Bhat, senior vice president for integrated consumer experience, talked about how Yahoo's redesigned home page has increased the amount of time spent on that page by 20 percent, and click-through has likewise improved on both ads and content on that page.

Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president for applications, pledged to improve spam filters and duplicate the Yahoo Mail experience on mobile phones. And Jimmy Pitaro, vice president of media, ran through all of the plans his group has to increase the number of people who come to Yahoo for news and entertainment.

Clearly, Yahoo already operates on a grand scale. "We are a broad-based Internet technology company that serves up the most interesting content on the Internet to 600 million people," Bartz said.

But advertisers "are looking for a safe neighborhood," Bartz said. She meant that in order to get high-quality advertisers to spend lots of money with Yahoo, they have to give them high-quality content that they can feel confident about putting their message beside. Perhaps Bartz could throw that lesson in for free as part of the search deal with Microsoft.

Throughout the revival story Yahoo has tried so hard to push this year, there's a sense that the company is a little defensive about being seen as a place where innovation no longer happens. Bartz admitted that "we had kind of lost your respect" over the past few years. "We are a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring."

Analyst days are not exactly the most exciting events produced by public companies. But it's all part of Yahoo's attempt to re-insert itself in the conversation about the future of the Internet, and investors will need to be on board for the company to make any real progress: not to mention that employee retention could get easier if the stock starts to climb.

Corrected 3:35 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of Bryan Lamkin's name.

Carol Bartz will bring Yahoo back to the CES keynote stage this January, the Consumer Electronics Association announced Tuesday.

Yahoo has given CES keynotes in the past but skipped last year, presenting instead a press conference on its Yahoo Connected TV project. Bartz will speak on Thursday January 7, 2010 in Las Vegas, when she might have a different set of businesses to present to the crowd.

CES has been morphing into a hybrid show for years, traditionally a consumer electronics showcase but increasingly bringing in the likes of Yahoo, Ford, and entertainment companies. Yahoo stuck to the consumer electronics script in its last couple of keynotes, including one gaffe-prone affair in 2006 where Tom Cruise rescued then-CEO Terry Semel.

But the leader of Yahoo's Connected TV group announced plans to leave this week, prompting speculation that Bartz is thinking about adding that group to the list of properties she'd like to shed. Instead, Yahoo may be planning to use its CES slot as a promotional vehicle for its media properties, which are ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is already tired of cynicism about the company, but understands that the business world still looks at Yahoo with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Yahoo introduced a new $100 million global ad campaign Tuesday in New York at the IAB's MIXX conference, centered on the marketing-friendly ideas of personalization and empowerment. Expect to see a blitz of Yahoo ads starting Monday emphasizing that "It's You" when it comes to finding what you want on the Internet, and especially at Yahoo.

Most of Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele's presentation, before those in town for Advertising Week and streamed live online, was constructed to emphasize that Yahoo cares about its users, with the reasonable presumption that advertisers will care about a company that can attract hundreds of millions of those users. Yahoo is already an Internet monster: the second largest property on the Web behind Google with 581 million visitors a month and 70 percent of the U.S. Internet population stopping by on a regular basis.

But Yahoo's campaign is really about more than that. It's also about making a break from the past vision of Yahoo as an out-of-control company that really didn't know what it wanted to be when it grew up.

This was clear in a question-and-answer session following Steele's presentation when Bartz alternatively blasted the "cynicism" that seems to follow Yahoo everywhere but acknowledged that the company has something to prove.

"Why are you cynical about us?" Bartz asked rhetorically in response to a question about whether too much emphasis is placed on the need for Yahoo to develop new strategies. "Why don't you get cynical about fricking Google? If you don't like us just leave us alone."

Of course, investors and the media are cynical about Yahoo because this is a company that presses the reset button on a regular basis. Over the past several years with CEOs like Terry Semel and Jerry Yang in charge, Yahoo has reinvented itself so many times that another CEO making another promise about another strategy tends to ring hollow.

Later in the press conference, Bartz softened her tone in response to a question about Yahoo's languishing stock price. "I think investors are like you guys (the media), saying 'let's wait and see.' We know it's our job to impress the press and investors, all of you are part of this world we live in."

Yahoo's stock (in red) has languished against rival Google and the broader Nasdaq market.

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

Still, this IS a different Yahoo. There is new blood throughout the top ranks of the company and they would prefer to not be judged on the dysfunction that was there when they arrived. Instead, they want to focus on the positives, such as Yahoo's immense audience, its advantage in the display advertising market, and its quirky sense of its own self.

The new campaign will try to highlight all of those strengths, reminding people that they can find nearly anything they want on Yahoo and interact with the huge number of people who have a Yahoo account. New search features discussed a few weeks back are also now open to all Yahoo visitors. "We want to show them what the new Yahoo is all about," Bartz said. Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences, added that this emphasis on personalization is really a new product development strategy that is being presented by the "It's You" campaign.

Which, of course, brings it back to the question that set Bartz off. Yahoo seems to want it both ways: to be seen as an already strong business on its own merits, and to be seen as a company in the midst of reinvention.

Will it work? Ad campaigns are unlikely to drive huge traffic growth for a collection of Web sites that is already so big, but Yahoo wants to emphasize to both consumers and advertisers that it is a destination site. "There's not a major event in the world where we don't break every Internet record" for traffic, Bartz said, and for Yahoo to grow that can't change.

While Yahoo shores up its image, Bartz can focus on the more unpleasant task of deciding what needs to disappear at Yahoo to keep the cost side of the equation down. She declined to comment on reports about a possible sale of Zimbra, but said Yahoo is evaluating much of its business and will make decisions about what to sell and what to shut down.

One year ago Yahoo was an exhausted company, following the breakdown of talks with Microsoft over a possible merger and a very public fight with activist investor Carl Icahn. Bartz's arrival in January has brought more change, with the company's deal to outsource search to Microsoft and yet another reorganization.

"I think what happened with Yahoo is people put a cloud over its head, and the company kind of put a cloud over its head," Bartz said. At the same time, she feels that the majority of its users outside Silicon Valley or New York are delighted with the company's services and enjoy spending time on Yahoo.

This is part of what still makes Yahoo a difficult company to understand: if the media is too cynical about Yahoo needing to change, and users outside the digerati love the services, why did Yahoo revamp its home page and will now spend $100 million on consumer advertising to emphasize a "new" product development strategy?

Yahoo's long nightmare is over, having finally offloaded its search business to Microsoft after years of rumors, negotiations and reversals. Now all it has to do is figure out what comes next.

A new era at Yahoo began the minute CEO Carol Bartz signed the paperwork turning over the right to conduct searches on Yahoo's huge network of Web sites to Microsoft in exchange for 88 percent of the revenue generated by Microsoft's Bing. Now Yahoo is first and foremost a media company, in the business of attracting as many people to its properties as possible in hopes of selling lucrative ad deals on those pages.

This strategy has not always worked on the Internet. Search advertising has been far and away the most effective way for advertisers to reach their audiences, and they have responded by pouring money into the coffers of the company that has best combined relevant search results and efficient advertising: Google.

But Bartz seems to have decided that Yahoo doesn't have the ability or the will to take on Google directly, arguing that the company should focus on what it does best and leave the technology to others. While that probably came as a bit of a surprise to the many engineers working on search technology inside Yahoo, Bartz hasn't exactly been hiding her intentions for Yahoo over the past eight months.

"We're not a search company," Bartz said flat-out in June, discussing how Yahoo is a different company than Google or Microsoft. Now that she's made that distinction official, what is Yahoo?

"It's where people find relevant and contextual information," Bartz said in May at the D: All Things Digital conference, clearly having envisioned a post-search Yahoo. "It's news, it's sports...home page, mail. It's a fabulous place."

That's a content company, turning the focus to how Yahoo should produce the kind of content and services that will keep existing users coming back for more and attract new ones to the site. Some began to wonder on Wednesday if Yahoo just turned itself into a bigger, purpler AOL.

On the services side, some areas, like Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and Messenger, are clearly where Yahoo is unlikely to take its foot off the gas pedal. Same for Yahoo's mobile strategy, a part of the Internet that is very much up for grabs, unlike the more mature PC-oriented Internet experience.

As Yahoo's new home page shows, the new challenge for a post-search Yahoo is a blend of content and services. Where will they come from?

(Credit: Yahoo)

So Yahoo isn't getting out of the technology business entirely. Yahoo will continue to need ways to keep its new home page hooked into the wider world of social networking, real-time communication, and things we haven't even thought of yet, and that will require smart, savvy engineering.

But on the content side, Yahoo will have to figure out whether it needs to expand its current offerings, pare down some of the less frequently used products, or tap the outsourcing strategy in this area as well. There's been quite a lot of turnover in recent years at Yahoo, but there are probably enough people left who remember that the last time Yahoo tried to play a prominent role in designing its own content, it didn't end well.

Is Yahoo on a path to becoming the world's biggest content aggregation site? If so, there are obviously far more costs that can be wrung out of its various products: how many people are required to produce OMG!? Does Yahoo Sports need all those writers? Couldn't the company just hire a few people to keep the site filled with content from partners and save a boatload without sacrificing traffic?

Yahoo declined to make anyone available Wednesday to share the company's broad vision beyond its determination to make its exit from the search arena official. Shareholders, who clearly now understand that they'll never see anything close to the $33-a-share offer that Microsoft originally dangled in front of co-founder Jerry Yang, will soon be impatient to see the long-term plan, now that a search deal has been worked out.

There's enough guaranteed revenue in the deal to keep things quiet for a while, but it's going to take two years--at minimum--for it to substantially shape the company. What will Yahoo look like then?

Yahoo's first annual shareholder meeting with Carol Bartz as CEO was largely uneventful, as she promised to turn Yahoo around by focusing on content and organization.

The actual business of the meeting was brief: all 12 nominees up for reelection to the board of directors were approved, three company-sponsored proposals were approved, and a shareholder "say on pay" proposal was rejected. Bartz spent most of the meeting talking about the work she has been doing to get Yahoo back on track, emphasizing that Yahoo has a strategy; it just needs to "execute"--business-speak for "not screw up all the time."

"We try to make sure we have 'wow' experiences for anybody who comes to a Yahoo site," Bartz said. She reminded shareholders several times that Yahoo is as much a content company as a search company, calling Yahoo "the largest online media company." This, of course, deflects comparisons to Google, who's stock has dramatically outperformed Yahoo's over the last several years.

Shareholders asked few pointed questions during their turn at the microphone. Bartz was asked twice to defend Yahoo's commitment to human rights in China, at a time when the Chinese government seems to be playing a more active role in cutting off Internet access to topics it doesn't like.

When asked whether her company is talking with Microsoft at the All Things Digital conference last month, Yahoo's Carol Bartz said: 'Yeah, a little bit.'

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

She made it clear that Yahoo isn't crazy about such crackdowns, but also said "Yahoo was not incorporated to fix China."

One shareholder asked Bartz to stop "dumbing-down the home page," which tends to carry the celebrity gossip story of the day as its main item. Yahoo is working on ways to give users a "fluffmeter," as Bartz put it, where they could choose just how much Jon and Kate news they want to see when visiting Yahoo. Bartz didn't elaborate, but it seems that could come along with a home page redesign later this year.

And she nipped all speculation about Microsoft in the bud within about five minutes of her prepared remarks when she said "if we ever have a deal with Microsoft, it will be announced publicly, and until then there's nothing to say." That's a line straight out of a Public Relations 101 textbook, neither admitting nor denying that any such talks are ongoing, as Bartz has previously hinted to.

Bartz closed the meeting with a partial nod to the roller coaster ride Yahoo shareholders have been treated to over the past several years. "Thank you for being Yahoo shareholders, and thank you for having faith in us."

Earlier this week, as she prepared for her first shareholder meeting as CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz told a story about her favorite question she ever received at a shareholder meeting while at Autodesk: "Why, young lady, are you qualified to keep your job?"

Yahoo's Carol Bartz will face shareholders Thursday for the first time since she became CEO in January.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

Bartz is unlikely to face such a question Thursday, just six months after assuming the top role at Yahoo following one of the most tumultuous years in the company's history. Bartz has shaken up Yahoo in her short time on the job; bringing in her own people with a cost-cutting mandate, putting the fear of God into the engineering team, and charming the business press with interview performances that call to mind what might have been the result if Lucille Ball and George Carlin had raised a techie daughter.

But shareholders will arrive at the Santa Clara Marriott with a key fact in mind: despite the relative calm of 2009 compared to the maelstrom of 2008, Yahoo seems to have little to show for the stability.

Revenue, earnings, and the all-important stock price are down from that tumultuous year; and even though the economy provides an understandable excuse, Yahoo's margins are still very thin, despite rounds of layoffs.

During its first fiscal quarter, Yahoo earned just $101 million in operating income on revenue excluding commissions of $1.16 billion. By contrast, Google earned $1.88 billion in operating income on revenue excluding commissions of $4.07 billion and AOL earned $150 million in operating income on revenue of $867 million.

How to turn things around? It seems Bartz is preparing to articulate a different vision of Yahoo than others have been used to hearing from those in purple. For example, she has suggested that search is not the be all and end all for Yahoo; an anathema to the establishment.

Instead, she has talked about acquiring social-networking companies and doubling down on attempts to court major advertisers to Yahoo's popular properties. Financial analysts love Bartz right now for her willingness to swing the hatchet on costs, and shareholders are likely to share an appreciation for her quest to get Yahoo's famously far-flung operations under some semblance of control.

The "it was like that when I got here" strategy only works for so long, however. Shareholders are likely to press Bartz on the chances of any kind of a deal with Microsoft, given that Yahoo's stock has languished far below Microsoft's best offer of $33 a share for the entire company last year. Heading into Thursday's meeting, it closed at $15.45.

Bartz has thus far been coy about her dealings with Microsoft, acknowledging that talks have taken place while insisting that Yahoo is a viable business on its own. A straight-out acquisition by Microsoft seems unlikely now, given the economic climate, but a search partnership does not appear out of the question.

However, the cost savings once thought to accompany such a partnership are less than many had thought, Bartz warned a few weeks ago. Some had thought Yahoo could save as much as much as $1.3 billion by agreeing to let Microsoft run its search-ad business, but Bartz put the figure at roughly $500 million in June.

If Bartz hangs onto Yahoo's search business, she'll need to explain how Yahoo can jump-start that portion of its revenue-generating strategy. Bartz has admitted that few people who aren't already on one of Yahoo's sites choose its search--98 percent of all Yahoo searches come from people already on Yahoo. That's still a lot of people, but with Google being Google, and Microsoft recording early success with the launch of Bing, Yahoo seems to be fading from the public's mind as a search option.

Still, Yahoo is the second-largest Web property in the U.S., and a revamped home page coming later this year might help draw more people onto the site, and therefore generate more searches and more impressions on display ads. Bartz seems to be hoping that a slimmer, more attractive Yahoo will gain traffic just as the advertising market hopefully comes back later this year and into next.

Thursday, she'll find out what shareholders think.