Inside Yahoo’s comms strategy, 30 years later
Talking Points highlights the topics, trends, and technology, defining the media and communications sectors.
Inside Yahoo’s comms strategy, 30 years later
At the helm of telling one of the internet's most iconic brands’ stories sits Sona Iliffe-Moon, Yahoo's Chief Communications Officer and interim Chief Marketing Officer. A seasoned consumer tech comms leader with past stints at Lyft, Facebook, and more, Sona joined Yahoo in November 2023 and has since worked to reintroduce the legacy brand and its core product experiences to today’s audiences.
We sat down with Sona to chat about her role at Yahoo, the company’s hit Super Bowl ad featuring none other than Bill Murray himself, how she’s integrating AI into her workflows, and even her tips for work-life balance.
This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
JSA: You’ve been at the helm of Yahoo’s comms department for over a year now. Any key learnings or overall thoughts on the experience?
Sona Iliffe-Moon: It has been an incredible journey and very much what I had hoped it would be. I often say that it feels like I’m working at a 30-year-old startup. I mean this in the sense that the company has beloved products, hundreds of millions of users, self-awareness and the resources and infrastructure you would expect with an established company, but with the energy and ambition of a startup!
JSA: You recently took on an interim role as Head of Marketing–how has it been going?
SM: It's really opened my eyes to how our storytelling resonates across different channels and audiences, and has reinforced my belief in the power of aligned communications and marketing.
The most energizing is seeing firsthand how naturally communications and marketing flow together when they're in sync. We're all telling the company's story–just through different channels and approaches.
Think about it–we're already doing real-time storytelling every day. We respond to breaking news, manage emerging issues, and pivot messaging on the fly. Those same skills translate beautifully to creating marketing–especially on social–that captures cultural moments that resonate when it matters most.
Having one foot in both worlds has shown me that when marketing and communications move in rhythm, that's when the magic really happens.
JSA: Yahoo is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and started with a bang with the return to the Super Bowl. From this experience, what are the best practices for legacy brands to reinvigorate themselves?
SM: I think it’s important to embrace your history. There's incredible value in brand recognition—people still have emotional connections to Yahoo that span decades. We’ve tapped into that nostalgia while demonstrating our impact today as well as our ambitions for tomorrow.
The Super Bowl wasn't a one-off stunt for us—it was part of a comprehensive strategy. You can't just drop a big ad campaign and expect that it will immediately influence user behavior. We backed it with substantive updates and improvements to our products and experiences that prove we're not just trading on past glory but building for the future.
Timing matters too. We could have done a splashy campaign anytime, but tying it to our 30th anniversary creates natural meaning and context. Look for authentic moments that align with your brand story.
Perhaps most importantly, we stayed true to Yahoo's personality. The comeback wasn't about reinventing ourselves as something we're not, but rather reintroducing the voice and energy that made people love Yahoo in the first place. We showed up with a spot every bit as memorable and quirky as our last big game appearance 20+ years ago which starred a talking dolphin.
For other legacy brands, I'd say don't underestimate the power of your brand equity. The trick isn't starting from scratch—it's reminding people why they connected with you in the first place, then showing them how you’re evolving. When you strike that balance between heritage and innovation, you can absolutely rewrite the narrative for a brand that's been around for decades.
JSA: Speaking of the Super Bowl, Yahoo just ran a very successful commercial with Bill Murray. Can you talk about the strategy for that as well as the results?
SM: When we decided to return to the Super Bowl after 20+ years, we knew we had to do something unexpected–so we called Bill Murray. As interim CMO, I partnered closely with our CEO and the brilliant marketing team to bring this campaign from concept to execution on an ambitious timeline–an exhilarating sprint that required focus, creativity, and a bit of fearlessness.
We could’ve done an anthem video or a throwback ad but we decided to trade anything anticipated or with heavy-handed branding for something completely unexpected. We developed a "second screen strategy" that acknowledged how people actually watch the game: phone in one hand, snack in the other. The TV spot was merely the opening act–an invitation to engage with Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Sports throughout the evening, rediscovering our brand in the process.
Entertainment Weekly featured Yahoo among the "best" ads and Variety ranked us #4 most watched of the night. Over 150,000 emails flooded BillHimself@yahoo.com within just the first two hours, his live stream on Yahoo topped 2 million views, we reached 8 million views on YouTube, and fans widely shared the experience across social media.
JSA: Big picture–what are the stories Yahoo is trying to tell right now, and what are the vehicles you’re using to tell them (earned, owned, paid)? Also, how are you thinking about the integration of external and internal communications?
SM: Yahoo's storytelling right now is all about reintroducing ourselves after spending the past year focused on improving our core product experiences. We've literally updated "every pixel of every product," and now we're ready to share what some media have called "the good internet" or "the gentler corner of the internet.”
You can see this approach across everything we're doing. The Super Bowl campaign with Bill Murray was an invitation to rediscover Yahoo in an interactive way. With media, we’re highlighting how we fit into people's daily routines. Our LinkedIn presence is also becoming key for sharing our personality and evolution story directly. What's working particularly well is how we're blending external and internal communications–our employees are some of our best advocates because they truly believe in our direction.
Many people use Yahoo products every day but might not actively think about the brand. We're working to close that gap by showing up in culture and conversations in ways that feel authentic. It's not about reinventing ourselves, but simply reminding people of the meaningful role we've always played–just with much better products that match how people use the internet today.
JSA: How are you and your team using AI right now? How do you see AI in comms evolving in the future, and how do you encourage team members or colleagues who are nervous or less enthused to get on board?
SM: It seems like every week we discover a new tool or application, and we're actively building our own AI workflows within the comms team. On the communications side, we use a range of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Grammarly, LinkedIn's writing assistant to generate or fine-tune copy, and Otter.ai has been fantastic for transcriptions, summaries, and even analysis.
Where we've seen particularly impressive results is in internal communications. We use Glean to help employees access documentation across platforms like Slack and Jira. Our Axios HQ integration (which incorporates ChatGPT and Dall-E) has transformed our newsletter production–we're seeing open rates between 72-84 percent depending on the audience!
For teams hesitant to embrace AI, I'd suggest making it part of your 2025 strategic plan. Consider bringing in an expert to guide integration, or encourage your team to explore AI applications with specific KPIs in mind and make it a recurring topic in team meetings. But one standing principle that guides us on our team: use AI for scale, not strategy. Strategy will always require human-level contextual understanding, judgment, and empathy.
The bottom line? If your company is using AI (and it probably is), it's important as communications professionals to understand it. And one of the best ways to understand something is to use it yourself.
JSA: We know you have an intense workout routine of weight training. How do you balance work, family, and health, and why is that important for you?
SM: For me, balance is all about being fully present—I'm all in at home and all in at work. When I'm with my family, I'm completely there. When I'm tackling projects at work, I'm totally invested. No half-measures.
Strength training isn't just my workout—it's my mindset builder. There's this amazing link between lifting weights and building inner strength. Every time I complete a challenging set, my brain registers: "I can do hard things." That feeling shows up everywhere else in my life. (And yes, being able to easily breeze through airports with my heavy luggage is a nice bonus!)
On-Record with The Scumbler’s Eliza Brooke
After a 12-year career covering culture and entertainment for the likes of Vanity Fair, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many others, Eliza Brooke is the latest in a growing list of decorated journalists making the leap to Substack.
But for now, her newsletter The Scumbler–which features conversations with “interesting creative people,” fashion, and what she describes as “the things that make life good,” such as these sketches of retirement-age men in cafes with their dogs–is still something hanging in the balance of her broader freelance portfolio.
Brooke has spent the last six years as a freelancer after leaving her full-time role as a staff reporter at Vox.
But today, Brooke admits that stability is becoming “increasingly important” to her in this upcoming “season” of her life, which has partially led her down the Substack road.
“I was really thinking a lot about the journalism piece of my work... It’s no secret that the media business is struggling.” Beyond the unrelenting layoffs impacting the industry, Brooke said she’s seeing it in her freelance rates as well. “It’s hard to get paid what you want.”
Brooke’s pitches were becoming less frequent yet more ambitious. She wanted a home for her work where she knew she could be published and one that offered her creative range.
“The interviews that I do are often stuff that I can’t sell to an outlet because there’s no real news peg or it’s somebody that’s a little bit niche,” she said. “But they're cool, and I know [my readers] are going to care about them.”
For Brooke, the uprising of independent journalism is more like a resurgence–likening the new media paradigm to a much humbler blog era. Except now, there’s a “professionalized aspect” of it where you can more readily monetize your work, she says.
But beyond paid subscribers and advertisers, Brooke says The Scumbler–today her passion project but aspiring full-time gig–is still creating other opportunities downstream in the meantime.
“[I’m] looking at the Substack as part of my broader journalism practice and not as something separate… When you have a Substack that people are reading and people care about… editors are paying attention to that… there’s kind of this nice interplay.”
But in taking the full Substack plunge, Brooke admits that the writing has become “a small piece” of the overall picture (a sentiment echoed last month by FOS’ David Rumsey, who says this shift is being felt by staff reporters, too).
“In this media economy, journalists really need to act as their own business managers and publicists.”
In between her normal work duties, Brooke has been meeting with publicists, marketers, and other Substack writers, investing time into understanding the promotion, design, and financial side of the business. She’s also carefully thinking through a soon-to-come paid offering–one that strikes the right balance between audience value, price, and her time.
Amid this, she’s needed to shift her thinking to look at the newsletter “like a full product, not a piece of writing.”
While she says the journey can be unpredictable, Brooke is embracing the unknown and enjoying her budding side gig, even if it’s not paying the bills yet.
“It’s my favorite part of my job right now, which is problematic because it’s not the paid part of my job,” she laughed.
Going independent has proven to be a very appetizing endeavor for more journalists than just Brooke. From Ashlee Vance to Richard Rushfield and plenty others, veteran reporters are abandoning top legacy publishers in droves, and the trend only seems to be accelerating–something Brooke pins to the current media climate.
“What’s apparent is that the traditional media model is not working for this moment in time for the most part… Journalism will exist, but it’s going to take different forms based on the media that emerges. That’s nothing new, but we’re definitely in a period of change.”
Getting consumers to pay for information is one of publishers’ biggest challenges–it’s never been easy, but you could argue it’s only getting harder. It’s why we see legacy outlets like the New York Times expanding their offerings beyond media into games and other verticals.
On the other hand, the list of independent newsletter success stories only seems to be growing, while some are even transitioning from solo operations to fully fledged media businesses with multiple staffers.
Brooke does wonder “how many Substacks can people pay for,” and it’s a reasonable question for an industry which wrestles with exactly this, but also where the answer has (thus far) been filed under ‘a lot.’ Substack revealed last week that the platform has more than 3 million customers subscribed to paid newsletters–up from 2 million last year.
Whether or not that spending persists over the long-term is outside our crystal ball. Still, Brooke is hoping that between her thoughtful conversations, offbeat fashion insights, and the little things that make life interesting, The Scumbler will earn your time and attention (we think so, too).
A look back at our greatest hits
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Talking Points is the communications newsletter written by our LA-based firm, JSA+Partners. Every month, we break down the topics, trends, and technology defining the media and communications sectors. Here’s some of our greatest hits to give you a flavor of what we cover here:
Eight communications predictions for 2025–from the rise of owned media and growing level of collective intelligence among communicators to, you guessed it, AI.
A breakdown of how social media shaped the election, turning likes into votes.
An overview of the newsroom layoffs happening across all beats and sectors–and how that impacts our job as communicators.
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[USA Today]: “'Survivor' 50: Jeff Probst talks casting all-stars season, whether he'd play 'Traitors'”
[Time Out]: “A Pacific Palisades pizzeria that lost everything is opening in Brentwood this weekend”
[Advertising Week]: “Winning Beyond the Big Game: 3 Reasons to Extend Your Ad Strategy to Gaming”
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