For a company that is reinventing itself, Yahoo still makes money the old fashioned way: It sells ad space, and there’s no consensus understanding of how it will replace it. Its logo has absolutely no bearing on that answer.

So what does the campaign tell us? Well, it says that it has a marketing department looking for ways to get attention, which might make more people check out its site. That’s totally legit. But it doesn’t tell us anything else about why or how the business is any different now than it was before the campaign began. In fact, its very premise about the graphic nature of branding tells us that at least some things at the company have remained very much the same. After that, I’m not sure it can tell us anything at all.

After 30 days of different logos and thousands of additional riffs on it, I fear that the ‹official› logo revealed in early September will be nothing more than the 31st iteration.

Jonathan Salem Baskin.