Allen is going to talk about consumer marketing trends, but we should be able to draw some comparisons to B2C companies as well.

The Consumer 2.0 is on-demand, online, and one click away from never going to a website ever again. They have more choices than ever, everything is immediately available, all the time. People are more connected than ever, they spend 10.5 hours per day looking at media, and an average of 50 minutes per day (during work) managing their fantasy football team. With Blackberry’s, cellphones, and laptops people have become master hypertaskers.

One of the ways people are managing this 40-hour day phenomenon is through affinity groups. (Yahoo has a great play here with Yahoo Groups, formerly eGroups.com which they acquired many years ago). People are also creators, with 65,000 YouTube videos uploaded every day, or people uploading their photos to Flickr.

The four pillars of marketing at Yahoo are search, content, community, and personalization.

Allen says that branding is not a department or group, it’s about everything they do every day all the time. They want their best customers to become their best embassadors, rather than traditional marketing which is a massive spray and pray media model. Their "make your own Shakira video" promotion received 10,000 submissions (remember those crazy "Hips Don’t Lie" videos?). Yahoo had a thousand groups dedicated to Shakira, several thousand images, custom radio channels, etc. The result was that the song was #1. Was that thanks to Yahoo? Who knows, but I’m sure Shakira’s label was happy.

In another example, Doritos had their user-generated video content for the Superbowl. They used Yahoo’s JumpCut software (starting to see the synergies?) to be the director, and the community could vote on their top 5. Some users even created their own marketing campaigns to get people to vote for their commercial online. The winner spent $25 to create the winning commercial, which was the 4th most popular Superbowl commercial.

Yahoo has given some directors tools to their users with things like the Yahoo yodel, Yahoo logos, and other things. Then they went to some film schools and gave them a little bit of money to create commercials. The result, well, you can see them for yourself on Yahoo. It makes good pre-roll video for commercials.

Allen is now talking about Yahoo! Answers as a market leader. Makes you wonder what happened to Google Answers (and will he even address it)? Nope, he’s taking the high road and not talking about Google’s failure here. As a promotion, Yahoo created a 3-story purple brain in Times Square where their top braniacs were answering the worlds toughest questions for 24 hours. Allen says they did this on a very small amount of money, although I think his definition of "small" is very different from mine.

Allen views content as an invitation to join you in a conversation. Your website is not just a destination, but a way to interact and build community.

This was a great session. It’s so refreshing to get some thought leadership from one of the world’s top brands.