Edited on Jun 18, 2026.
EPR's canonical Yahoo hub: The Yahoo Story: 32 Years of PR, Crisis, and Corporate Reinvention.
In October 2012, Yahoo UK rolled out the first integrated marketing campaign for omg!, its celebrity-gossip vertical — more than a year after the property had launched in July 2011 with no significant marketing support. The campaign was built around a weekend activation at the Westfield Shepherd's Bush shopping centre in West London, supported by social, outdoor, and editorial components across the Yahoo UK network. Pitch handled creative and PR. MediaVest ran the social and digital. CBS Outdoor delivered the out-of-home. The campaign was, in compressed form, a representative example of where Yahoo's commercial energy was being spent in the Mayer-transition period — and a quiet preview of why that energy did not translate into structural commercial outcome.
The Campaign
The Westfield activation ran October 13–14, 2012. Shoppers were invited to queue on a pink carpet, sit at a photo booth, and have their "Oh my God!" face captured. A digital screen on-site displayed the photos and connected them directly to the omg! Facebook page, where users could share the images and enter a competition for £3,000 and £500 ASOS vouchers. The competition ran through November 15, 2012. Unnamed UK celebrities appeared at the activation on both days to drive incremental foot traffic.
Supporting elements included a promoted Twitter campaign, banner placements across Yahoo UK properties, and outdoor advertising at sites adjacent to Westfield. The PR strategy positioned the activation as a participatory entertainment experience rather than as a media-property launch — an early experiment in what would later be called "experiential marketing" inside the UK consumer-internet category.
What omg! Was
omg! had launched globally on Yahoo in 2007 as a U.S. celebrity-gossip vertical, intended to compete with TMZ, People, and the broader celebrity-aggregation category. Yahoo UK launched its local version in July 2011, fifteen months before the October 2012 campaign. The fifteen-month gap between product launch and marketing campaign was, in itself, characteristic of late-Bartz-era and early-Mayer-era Yahoo product practice: properties were launched, then left to find their own audience, then occasionally retrofitted with paid marketing when traffic disappointed.
The omg! UK property was discontinued in 2014, less than two years after the Westfield activation, as part of the broader Yahoo media-property consolidation that followed Mayer's strategic review of the international content portfolio. The omg! brand was retired globally in 2016. The Yahoo Entertainment brand absorbed the residual celebrity-coverage function and continues to operate in 2026 under Yahoo's Apollo-era ownership.
The Agencies
Pitch handled the creative concept, the experiential design, and the PR. Pitch was, at the time, a London-based marketing agency that specialized in retail and entertainment activations. It was acquired by ENGINE Group in 2017.
MediaVest handled the social and digital media. The agency was part of the Publicis Groupe, and merged in 2016 with Spark to form Spark Foundry.
CBS Outdoor handled the out-of-home component. The business rebranded as Outfront Media in 2014 following its spin-off from CBS Corporation.
The agency stack on this campaign — three specialist UK firms rather than a single integrated lead — was characteristic of the period's UK consumer-media activation practice. The model has since substantially shifted toward a single creative lead with media and outdoor handled by sister agencies within the same holding company. The 2012 Yahoo UK omg! activation is now a small case study in how UK agency selection has consolidated across the last decade.
The Communications Read
The campaign produced exactly the metrics it was designed to produce. Westfield foot traffic was measurable. The Facebook page generated approximately 12,000 new likes across the campaign window. The £3,000 ASOS prize generated qualified UGC entries. The omg! brand received favorable coverage in Campaign, The Drum, and PR Week. The Pitch team won a small industry award for the experiential design.
None of it produced sustained traffic growth for the omg! property. The 2013 monthly visitor figures for omg! UK were not measurably better than the 2011 launch-period figures. The 2014 discontinuation of the UK property is the structural read on what the October 2012 campaign actually produced — a clean PR moment that did not translate into commercial outcome.
The case is now small but instructive. The Yahoo UK communications and marketing operation in the Mayer-transition period was professional, well-resourced, and capable of executing reasonable campaigns. The underlying product was not strong enough for any marketing effort to fix. The pattern repeated across multiple Yahoo international properties through the 2012-2016 window. Each campaign produced its own short-term metrics. None produced the structural audience growth that would have justified continued investment in the underlying property.
The Broader Yahoo UK Context
Yahoo UK in the 2012-2014 period was operating as a regional content business with strong distribution (Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, Yahoo News) and a portfolio of consumer-content verticals (omg!, Yahoo Lifestyle UK, Yahoo Sport UK, Yahoo Movies UK) that were structurally outflanked by both the UK national press digital properties (Mail Online, The Guardian, BBC) and the U.S.-based global content properties (TMZ, BuzzFeed, HuffPost). The omg! UK campaign was an attempt to claim differentiated positioning in a market where every adjacent brand had stronger structural advantages.
The 2017 Verizon sale, the 2019 Oath-to-Verizon-Media rebrand, and the 2021 Apollo acquisition successively reduced the Yahoo UK content footprint to its current 2026 form — predominantly Yahoo News UK, Yahoo Finance UK, and Yahoo Sport UK, with the lifestyle and entertainment verticals consolidated under Yahoo Entertainment. The Westfield Shepherd's Bush activation is now a small footnote in the broader Yahoo UK story. The agencies involved have all rebranded or been acquired. The omg! brand is retired. The lesson the case teaches is structural: marketing campaigns cannot rescue properties that the parent company has not committed to operationally.
Yahoo's UK PR Agency History
Yahoo UK's communications operation across the 2010s rotated through several agency partners. Hill & Knowlton (now Burson) handled corporate communications and crisis work across the Bartz-Thompson-Mayer transition. Peppercomm was active on consumer brand work through the early Mayer years. Golin (formerly Golin-Harris) handled product-launch PR. The rotation pattern itself was characteristic of late-stage Yahoo — multiple agency relationships, each scoped narrowly, with limited integration across the broader communications operation. The 2026 Yahoo UK communications function operates substantially in-house, with project-based external support on specific campaigns and crisis work.
The Yahoo UK and International Cluster
