The last time Marissa Mayer was at
Turner Hall, it was for her first concert, ever. She went to see Michael
Damian, a “Young and the Restless” star who’d succeeded with a slightly vain second
career in pop music and a radio hit called “Rock On.” Coming back on Sunday, the
stylishly gritty venue on North Fourth Street looked oddly familiar,
though she couldn’t think of why at first. “Oh my God,” she said, “I’ve been
here before.”
But back then, there were no purple
spotlights outside, no corporate buses ringing the block, and she wasn’t the
CEO of Yahoo, the country’s fifth largest internet company, according to the
2012 Fortune 500. There were no ranks of marketing staffers carefully managing
the event, part of the company’s “On the Road” campaign to accompany its new push
into the mobile app market. She wasn’t the star guest, more of interest than
rapper Macklemore or DJ Ryan Lewis, both of who would perform later in the
night in an attempt to connect more affectionately with a number of young fans
and Yahoo users waiting outside. A lot had changed.
She was a mother now. In fact, this was
her first observance of Mother’s Day. Celebrations started in Chicago with what
she called a “nice brunch” and more or less ended with a failed attempt at shopping
for baby clothes made by the Milwaukee-based Florence Eiseman company, a
favorite of Mayer’s. The family (made up of Mayer, son McAllister and husband
Zachary Bogue, a lawyer and venture capitalist) didn’t make the drive before
the outlet closed, Mayer says. Later, she ate dinner at Turner’s, downstairs
from the concert hall, and made her way up to the venue’s VIP section for
interviews and photos, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black boots. She more
resembled the teenage Marissa that hung out at Mayfair and the old Northridge
malls while visiting her grandfather (Clem Mayer, a seller of insurance and the
long-time mayor of Jackson, Wis.) than the ascendant executive who’s been
strangely fetishized by national press since her surprise hire in 2012.
The former Google engineer and envoy’s task
of pulling Yahoo out of a painful decline makes for surprising reading, and her
young age (37), recent fast-paced birth and brief struggle with employees over
banning telecommuting have driven plenty of web traffic as well. To see a sign
of this mild obsession, look no further than Forbes’ recent national approval poll (a kind of survey routinely used to measure support for a U.S. president)
asking, “Do you have an overall positive or negative opinion of the job Marissa
Mayer is doing as CEO of Yahoo?” In four tries at administering the survey,
between 72 and 81 percent of people responded that they had “no strong opinion.”
Of those who answered otherwise, positive responses tended to outweigh negative
ones by a slight margin. The story’s headline concluded that “Despite Best
Efforts, Marissa Mayer’s Public Has No Strong Opinions About Her.” Would Larry
Page’s?
Mayer, the “Googirl,” was one of Google’s
earliest engineers and its first female employee, and she played a central role
in the development of Google Search and other applications that have become as
familiar to many users as their own limbs. (How many people can type maps.google.com with a sudden mashing
movement out of pure habit? I know I can.)
Mayer’s work at Stanford on artificial
intelligence fed into her work at Google and now Yahoo, where she’s attempting
to implement the ethos of usability and simplicity crystallized famously on the
Google Search home page: one logo, one box, two buttons. Mayer designed the layout,
which presents no content to users who are visiting the page to search for results
that (at least until Google Mind-Reading enters open beta) are most likely
unrelated. New weather and mail apps from Yahoo are attempts at interfaces that
cozy up in a similar way to users in the hope of becoming familiar, reflexive
tools.
To hear Mayer talk about it, Yahoo is a
kind of benevolent O.G. among internet companies. “The really amazing thing is
that we’re friends with everyone,” she says. “We have a lot of different
partnerships across our industry. We’ve got partnerships in place with Google, with
Microsoft, with Apple, with all these different designers.”
Sunday’s concert was the first Mayer
attended from the On the Road tour, which is staging shows around the U.S. in
May and in Europe in June and July. Her return to Turner may have been prompted by more than just the
venue’s Wisconsin address and the opportunity to see Wisconsin family; nostalgia for Milwaukee may have played a role, however subliminal. “I remember getting in early enough to go to Mayfair and
the Steak Escape. I loved the Steak Escape,” she says of long-past trips to Wauwatosa and the Milwaukee area. “Toys R’ Us was another big thing.
Wausau didn’t have Toys R’ Us, and Milwaukee had Toys R’ Us. We were really
lucky when we could come down here and go to Toys R’ Us.”
Forbes never asked what’s on Mayer’s MP3
player these days, so we did. “Let’s see,” she says. “I have of lot of the Killers, and I
listen to a lot of U2, Coldplay. I also really like Kelly Clarkson and Taylor
Swift. I’m very pop-y.”
After the concert, she planned a swift
return to California, where she’s trying to reinvent an august internet company
– and where everyone’s watching to see if she’ll succeed.
“Monday is always a big day for us,” she
says, “so I’ve got to go back.”
(photo courtesy of Lydo Le for Yahoo! On the Road)
