Microsoft and Yahoo: Does It Make Sense

KNOWLEDGE @ WHARTON— On Friday, February 1, Microsoft announced it was making an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, a 62% premium over Yahoo’s stock price at the time. If the deal is completed, it would be the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history and, the company hopes, would jumpstart its struggling Internet search and advertising businesses, as well as add to its online portfolio a number of popular web sites such as Flickr, Yahoo HotJobs and Yahoo Personals. Read article.

If Online Marketing Is the Future, Why Are Some CMOs Stuck in the Past?

KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON— Americans spend an average of 14 hours a week online and 14 hours watching TV. But marketers spend 22% of their advertising dollars on TV and only 6% online, according to data compiled and analyzed by Google.

“Of all the advertising platforms, the Internet is one of the few on an upward trend,” says Wharton marketing professor Patti Williams. “But if you look in terms of the sheer amount of time most consumers are spending online and the amount of dollars being spent to reach them, it is still probably way under what it should be.” Read article.

Unilever and Emerging Economies

ECONOMIST— When a consumer-goods company casts around for the best growth prospects, rarely does anything look more promising than emerging economies. These markets are growing so rapidly that within just two years they will account for half of all the world’s consumer spending, estimates Harish Manwani, head of the Asian and African businesses of Unilever, a giant of the world’s consumer-goods industries. But even with more than a century of experience in some of these countries, Unilever tripped up.

Few companies have had the head start in places like Africa, China, India and Latin America that Unilever enjoyed. Yet despite the Anglo-Dutch giant’s formidable range of products and unprecedented depth of local knowledge, when rivals began to push harder its empire came under threat. Unilever was forced to re-examine its legacy and to act on what it found. Now the results are coming through. Read article.