The City of Burbank recently celebrated the entry of Yahoo! Search Marketing into its corporate community with a party. It was also a celebration of sorts for one of the biggest local successes in recent years by a city in wooing a company, one that in part other cities could learn from. To get Yahoo!, Burbank relied partly on old fashioned small town charm, partly on location and partly on financial considerations. The sincere effort made by the city won over the decision makers at Yahoo! Search Marketing, “We told them we’re Burbank’s greatest cheerleaders and we think once you get over here you’re going to feel the same way as we do about the city,” said City Manager Mary Alvord said. “And it seemed to work.” A staff of 1,200-plus makes Yahoo! Search Marketing the largest employer at the 19-acre Media Studios North office park on Empire Avenue. Developer M. David Paul & Associates is also the firm behind the Pinnacle Building in the Burbank media district. When the division’s 900-plus employees outgrew its space in two office buildings in Pasadena’s Old Towne neighborhood, Burbank was one of three finalist cities on the relocation list. Burbank is different in its approach to attracting new business. In that city, officials can give a personal touch to companies looking to relocate within its borders, said City Councilwoman Marsha Ramos, who was mayor in late 2004 when the move to Burbank was announced. She wrote letters, made phone calls and extended an invitation to meet with Yahoo! officials, Ramos said. “If we want an asset to the community we do every bit of outreach to make it happen,” Ramos said. With the search division growing in employees, staying in Pasadena was not an option as the city could not offer the large area the company needed, said Chris Williams, vice president of human resources. So it came down to Burbank, downtown Los Angeles and Monrovia. Burbank was chosen because it was the best match for the company’s brand, the necessary space requirements and financial considerations. It also provided the opportunity to create an environment similar to that found in the company headquarters in upstate Sunnyvale. The baseline cost per-square-foot for the buildings at 3333 and 3355 Empire Avenue and the city’s tax structure was pleasing to the company, Williams said. “Downtown L.A. has a tax on revenue that Burbank does not,” Williams said. Alvord credits developer M. David Paul for its role in the Yahoo! relocation in that it builds state-of-the-art buildings with first-class amenities. The Yahoo! buildings include two cafeterias and a gym and the courtyard area provides outdoor seating, landscaped pathways and life-size chess board. But one of the biggest amenities available to Yahoo! employees lies across Hollywood Way. “It didn’t hurt having an airport across the street,” Alvord said. Flights arriving from or departing to San Jose from Bob Hope Airport, especially those in the morning or late afternoon hours are filled with Yahoo! employees. Williams, a Burbank resident, is one of those employees commuting by plane to Sunnyvale. For those employees with commutes not involving an airplane, Burbank made it more convenient to use public transportation to the campus by expanding its bus system with routes to and from the Media Studios North area from the downtown Metrolink station and the MTA’s North Hollywood Red Line station. Ridership numbers on the Metrolink route saw an increase from 4,600 in October 2005 to 5,200 in October of this year. For the Red Line route launched in November 2005, its first full month pulled in 1,500 riders. In October of this year, the route had 5,696 riders. Yahoo! promotes a rideshare program and invited city staff to pass out literature about the bus routes. The company voluntarily became an associate member of the Burbank Transportation Organization, a semi-public body that addresses transportation needs in the city, said Burbank Transportation Services Manager Andrew Carrasco. Yahoo! Search Marketing began in Pasadena as a start-up called GoTo.com and later changed its name to Overture Services. Yahoo! acquired the company in 2003 and gave it the new moniker of Yahoo! Search Marketing. Salespeople, marketers, and engineers work together to sell search advertising listings to businesses of all sizes and provide the technology to get the listings on the Internet. Using an auction model, businesses bid for prime space in search results to get their name and product before the public. The business only pays a fee when a customer clicks on their listing, said Gaude Lydia Paez, a spokeswoman for Yahoo! Search Marketing. “That was a model GoTo.com pioneered back in 1998,” Paez said. Located on the second floor of one of the buildings is the division’s search operations center, sort of the equivalent of mission control at a NASA facility. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week employees keep close tabs on the numbers and graphs appearing on eight wall-mounted screens and nine computer monitors inside the glass-enclosed room. Search advertising provides such a huge chunk of revenue stream for the company that if the system goes down and is unavailable for one minute, two minutes users are driven away to other search engines. So, if there is a problem in the Yahoo! network the staff in the search operation center is the first to know about it. “We’re very end-user friendly so a large part of what we do here is monitor response times,” said Greg Sly, the director of the center. “So if you’re searching for, say, DVDs, we monitor how fast we can get the results back up.” The move from Pasadena, however, did mean trading the close proximity to the eateries, shopping and night life of Old Towne for activities prohibited there because of space constraints. The search marketing staff can now meet in larger numbers, replacing teleconferences and small meetings. The adjacent Hilton hotel has become a popular meeting space, especially for executives flying in from Sunnyvale to give presentations. Dining out and shopping remains a short drive or bus ride away from the campus. Restaurants and retailers drummed up additional business with discounts exclusively for Yahoo! employees. Shopping styles shifted from high-end Colorado Boulevard to the Target and Best Buy at the Empire Center and the adjacent Costco. When promoting Burbank as the ideal site for Yahoo!, Alvord said she did worry the city could not offer a replication of Old Towne but that it could compete better than Los Angeles.
