By Megan Graham | Photographs by Katelyn Perry for WSJ

Yahoo was once the king of the internet, with a market value of more than $125 billion at the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000.

These days, a Yahoo email account is often seen as a sign of a user's older age, and people are far more likely to search on Google. Yahoo and AOL combined were valued at about $5 billion in 2021, when private-equity giant Apollo Global Management bought them from Verizon Communications.

But Yahoo still draws major traffic: 3 billion global web visits in February, excluding app users, according to Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company. That is on par with Amazon.com, which drew 2.3 billion, but trails Google, at 76 billion.

Who better to return the once-storied internet brand to its glory days than the least flashy guy in marketing? Most recently chief brand officer of Paramount Global, Josh Line started this past week as Yahoo's chief marketing officer, tasked with getting the brand back into the zeitgeist with consumers and advertisers.

The Yahoo brand is still widely recognized, and many people still use its products like Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance every day, even if they don't realize it, said 46-year-old Line. He remembers passing the iconic Yahoo billboard when he first started working in advertising in New York more than 20 years ago.

"A big part of the marketing challenge is to kind of reignite that love and to put the brand back into culture," Line said. He plans to build on the momentum started by Yahoo's local Super Bowl ad this year starring Bill Murray, the brand's first during the big game since 2002.

At the 2024 South by Southwest tech festival, the Paramount+ streaming service had a big marketing push. A building was remodeled as a Paramount+ ski lodge where visitors could get "Star Trek: Discovery" and "1883" airbrush tattoos or sip drinks in a "Lawmen" rooftop saloon.

Anne Mullen, a marketer who used to work at Nickelodeon, saw the splashy rollout and texted Line, her former colleague, to see if he wanted to meet up. Line was then at Paramount Global, which was responsible for the massive marketing event in Austin, Texas.

He responded from New York. "He was back at HQ, doing the hard work," said Mullen. "Paramount+ was absolutely pervasive and everywhere. But he didn't need to be throwing the party, being the face of it."

In the advertising industry, big personalities are common, with superstar chief marketing officers operating a circuit of awards shows, podcasts and panel appearances. That hasn't been Line's style.

"I'm definitely a more introverted person, which may not be typical for a CMO," Line said. He plans to be more public facing than before when "it's important for Yahoo and for the brand."

Line grew up in Carlisle, Pa., where his father was a cardiologist and his mother stayed home to raise him and his two sisters. At Princeton, he ended up studying history despite taking pre-med classes to follow in his father's footsteps. "I realized that I was good at synthesizing information," he said. That skill would later serve him as he analyzed data to formulate strategies for brands.

After graduation, he followed investment banking friends to New York. At one friend's urging, he applied for a management development program at ad agency Bates Worldwide and ended up working there as an account executive on Pfizer's consumer products like Sudafed and Benadryl.

Line was fresh out of college when he went to his first focus group. He sat in the back of the room eating M&M's and listening to people talk about their experiences with Sudafed and Benadryl and their responses to test ads and product concepts.

"It became clear how important it is for me to put myself in their shoes and think about their experiences and more importantly listen to them, while also recognizing that their behavior doesn't always align with what they're saying," he said.

Line worked his way up through the hottest ad agencies at the time, from Omnicom Group's TBWA\Chiat\Day -- probably best known for Apple's iconic "1984" Super Bowl ad -- to Anomaly and then Droga5.

Line joined Anomaly in its early days, working on brands like Eos lip balm and Gold Peak Iced Tea. He helped chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin fame build out a cooking show, cookbook, PBS series and e-commerce site. The show was part branded content and on a shoestring budget, but Line pulled it off, even down to working for the first time with a general contractor to build a studio kitchen.

"He loved the broad and wide-ranging briefs that we got and didn't bat an eyelid at taking on things that were hard or shaped differently," said Anomaly co-founder Johnny Vulkan.

Line's pedigree at top agencies put him on the radar at entertainment company Viacom when it had just launched an in-house agency called Scratch.

He's like the prodigy in "The Queen's Gambit" Netflix show who could visualize all the chess pieces in her mind, said Sarah Jane Dhall, who worked with Line at Viacom and is now chief operating officer of cultural insights advisory Cultique. "He can see a marketing ecosystem like that," she said.

Over 14 years at Paramount -- home to channels like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon -- Line played a major role in the company's rebrand from ViacomCBS and the launch of its Paramount+ streaming service. Though Paramount has seen its share of turbulence between corporate mergers and cord-cutting driving down the value of its traditional cable networks, former colleagues say Line was able to keep the peace as he navigated big egos and competing interests.

Line lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City with his husband of eight years, who works at a major ad agency. Former colleagues describe Line as someone who is all about work much of the time, though he says he loves swimming, hosting and cooking -- a hobby he picked up after his work with Ripert, the French chef.

Yahoo Chief Executive Jim Lanzone said Line's job will be to reignite appreciation for the Yahoo brand. The company wants to persuade consumers that Yahoo is "a nice place to stay on the internet" and that the company is a safe, effective place for businesses to run their ads.

"Over time, there have been different sugar highs of people trying to talk up the Yahoo brand, but it wasn't backed up by quality and true growth," said Lanzone. "People are rooting for us, and they want to see us win and get back out there. So, yeah, that's a big job for Josh."

Write to Megan Graham at megan.graham@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 04, 2025 22:00 ET (02:00 GMT)

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