Yahoo’s Erin Miller on changing the story people think they know

I met Erin Miller at Mission North’s recent Corporate Reputation Roundtable, where her take on Yahoo’s comeback got the room talking. Erin leads global corporate communications at Yahoo. Before that, she ran external communications at Handshake and spent nearly seven years at Meta leading communications for its news and media products.

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I was intrigued by some of the insights she shared and asked if she’d be willing to have a follow up chat. We ended up discussing several interesting topics, including why changing a reputation can be harder than starting from scratch and why her team treats AI answer engines as an audience. This is an edited version of that conversation.
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You’ve described this as a renaissance moment for Yahoo. What’s driving it?

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We’re reconnecting with users who’ve been with us from the very beginning while also engaging a new generation of Yahoos. Everyone’s heard of Yahoo, but fewer people know what we’re up to today. We’re using culture-first storytelling to reignite the brand love for Yahoo, rooted in consumer insights, humor and personality. It’s about closing the gap between what people remember and what we are now, and getting them to take a second look.

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It’s about closing the gap between what people remember and what we are now, and getting them to take a second look.

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What does culture-first storytelling look like in practice?

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When we relaunched the Yahoo Weather app, we tapped Bravo’s Kyle Cooke, who’s known for his drink brand Loverboy, as our official "Weatherboy". Every forecast in his daily outlook was measured by a "chance of party". We told the innovation story alongside that. Downloads went up, and people opened the app multiple times a day, more than they ever had before.

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Is that a departure for Yahoo? And why is it harder to rebuild a reputation than to start from scratch?

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It’s not a departure. In the ’90s, when we were the original guide to the internet, we ran a lot of playful campaigns. We were known for the Yahoo yodel. We’re revisiting that narrative.

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Rebuilding, for us, is harder than starting from scratch. People already have a story about Yahoo in their heads. Some of it’s nostalgia, some of it’s outdated ideas, and some of it’s just wrong information about who we are today. It’s really hard to argue people out of that mindset. The upside is familiarity, but you still have to earn the second look.

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We give people new evidence over and over until the new story is what they know us to be

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So it’s a drumbeat. We give people new evidence over and over until the new story is what they know us to be. That shows up in product launches, in customer case studies for our advertising business, and in executives being present on a range of stages with a consistent message. Events have been big for us, too. We went back to South by Southwest this year with our biggest-ever activation, built around our new AI answer engine Yahoo Scout. We were also at Cannes, and we featured the Yahoo Explorer’s Society theme on the Croisette there to bring our products like Scout to life.

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What do you most want people to reconsider?

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Some people haven’t tried our products in a while, so they assume we’re not as relevant as we used to be. Once they try them it’s "oh wow, these are amazing". Getting in front of people in person has worked for us.

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At San Francisco Tech Week we partnered with Joanna Stern, who writes the New Things newsletter, on a dinner discussing the open web. We also hosted the New Media Summit with Ollie Forsyth, who writes New Economies, and had more than 100 media, marketing, communications and tech leaders in the room. The reaction was that Yahoo is really back. People are now seeing us the way we see ourselves, as an innovative tech company. We’re not a throwback. Yahoo’s back!

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At the Mission North roundtable, you chose trust as the foundation of Yahoo’s reputation. How do you earn it?

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We were the original trusted guide to the internet. Trust is built in the small moments. For a lot of people, we’re their inbox, their stock portfolio and their fantasy team, which is sacred to a lot of people. We’re how they get their news in the morning.

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So, earning trust means being transparent about how we use data and AI. It also means being accurate when misinformation travels faster than ever, as well as being reliable for our users and business partners.

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How is AI reshaping your business and team?

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AI is changing how people find information and how advertisers reach audiences. For communicators, LLMs have become another audience. AI answer engines tell people who a company is before they’ve even read a headline.

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For communicators, LLMs have become another audience. AI answer engines tell people who a company is before they’ve even read a headline. 

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We recently hired someone on my team focused on AI adoption for communications. Earned media remains very important to us. But, she’s asking which outlets perform better in LLMs, what our generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy should be, and which tools we should build or buy. Owned content resonates with LLMs too. So we created Built by Yahoo, a newsroom series about how we build products, and turned it into a LinkedIn newsletter with thousands of subscribers just a month after launch.

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At the same time, we are asking ourselves how to keep human judgment in the work. How do we maintain an authentic voice? How do we not ship slop? 

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AI also makes crises move faster, so our team is building a custom AI agent that filters news and social signals into Slack in real time. As much as we value these new audiences, we’ll keep valuing human judgment and credibility.

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Erin Miller is the vice president of global corporate communications at Yahoo. This interview is part of Signalmakers, a Mission North series exploring how modern communicators blend curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity to lead in an AI-driven world.