Yahoo sheds Overture brand

Yahoo's commercial subsidiary has taken on a new name.

The portal giant on Monday shed its Overture Services brand and renamed the unit Yahoo Search Marketing. The replacement of the Overture brand will take place in the U.S. market initially, the company said. Other international markets will be re-branded later, but the Overture brand will be maintained in Japan and Korea.

The change comes nearly two years after Yahoo's purchase of Overture, a pioneer in the commercial search business. The acquisition was meant to bolster Yahoo's marketing efforts and its position against rivals Google and Microsoft.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said the re-branding is designed to bring all its products for advertisers under one roof. Precision Match, Overture's search advertising product, will now be sold under the Sponsored Search name, while its local paid search product is now called Local Sponsored Search.

Besides renaming existing products, some new services also have been added. Travel Submit is designed to let advertisers submit offers and deals to Yahoo's travel Web site through an online account. Marketing Console is a new tool to track advertising campaigns, and Search Optimizer is meant to enhance ad campaign performance, the company said.

"Unifying all of our search marketing and related products under one umbrella is one of many steps we will be taking to provide an easy, one-stop experience for our advertisers," Steve Mitgang, senior vice president of product marketing at Yahoo, said in a statement. "Over the past six months, we've introduced new product features and refined our infrastructure to make search marketing easier for our advertisers."

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Yahoo: We're dilluting our brand

Yahoo has done it again. Its taken something with potentially great brand value and changed it to a meaningless Yahoo. I guess they figure if they slap Yahoo on their services its instantly better. I personally subscribe to Al Ries' marketing opinion that one brand can't be all things.

So instead of gaining customer's with the Overture name, which suggests that it can assist in a company's marketing system beyond yahoo, they've changed the name to Yahoo Services which suggests that "if you want to reach customers outside of Yahoo's network" we can't help you there. Everyone already knows they are second fiddle to google in search, they might as well roll out the "We're Number 2! banners"