In a shift that is sure to be much commented on by the advertising industry, Yahoo has tapped Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to take the lead for its creative, advertising, digital marketing and strategic planning efforts.

The San Francisco-based Goodby, which is owned by the Omnicom Group, is known for innovative ideas and has done such memorable campaigns as the terrific “Got Milk?” campaign.

Perhaps a “Got Yahoo?” campaign is in the future?

Until now, the top job of goosing Yahoo’s tarnished brand, as part of a recently launched $100 million marketing push, has been helmed by Ogilvy & Mather.

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All the news is already out about the new Yahoo homepage, which was launched today for users in the U.S. It features customizable apps, as well as a cleaner look.

But, just in case you are not satisfied yet, here is the full press release on the new front page for Yahoo.

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Although it’s not news that Yahoo was readying a new version of its homepage and has spent a lot of time doing so–in fact, it’s gone all Handy Manny with a whole lot of test renovations–the Internet giant begins the massive rollout of it tomorrow.

The official launch of what was code-named “Metro,” which Yahoo had previously said was coming in the fall, will take place on an opt-in “beta” basis for the hundreds of millions of users in the U.S. and will be extended to France, the U.K. and India later this week.

The change is an important one for Yahoo, since its front page–one of the most trafficked on the Web–is perhaps its most powerful calling card to users and advertisers, as well as to Wall Street.

Here are the details and also an interview about it all with Yahoo SVP Tapan Bhat, as well as screenshots of the new page.

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Tomorrow, Yahoo will officially unveil the latest redesign of its homepage, an almost complete rejiggering of the look and feel of one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.

The latest launch comes after about a half-dozen redesigns of the homepage since Yahoo was founded, the last one in 2006.

BoomTown thought it might be instructive to take a look at what has come before it, seeing how the Yahoo front page has evolved since 1994.

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That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.

Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.

Just smaller and cuter.

So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.

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BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

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Yahoo is losing yet another top executive–Toby Coppel, its EVP and managing director of Europe and Canada, is set to announce today that he is stepping down.

The departure, which has been in the works for months, is not related to the recent news that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is also relinquishing his job as soon as the company completes its search for another CEO.

His successor will be Rich Riley, who is currently SVP of Europe’s Advertiser & Publisher Group, which put him in charge of all revenues for the division.

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Here’s the internal Yahoo memo from President Sue Decker about the stepping down of Yahoo European head, Toby Coppel, which BoomTown wrote about here.

The departure, which has been in the works for months, is not related to the recent news that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is also relinquishing his job as soon as the company completes its search for another CEO.

His successor will be Rich Riley, who is currently SVP of Europe’s Advertiser & Publisher Group.

Here’s the memo.

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Yahoo will begin testing out versions of its new main homepage to a minuscule number of users starting tomorrow, employing a design that more significantly allows users to customize the starting page in a way that essentially amounts to a kind of My Yahoo-lite for everyone.

Making such a shift will also be a big perceptual deal for Yahoo, which needs to prove it has remained current and open, especially compared to faster-growing rivals like Facebook.

Thus, making a success of its new design is critical, and Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang has been touting the idea that Yahoo must be the “starting point” to the Web for users.

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While there are rumors that these wildly popular videos of a posse of cellphones popping popcorn by their rings or other unknown death rays are fixed, BoomTown actually does not care one iota, as the remote possibility that they are not is freaking me out.

Frankly, it would freak Orville Redenbacher out too.

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After my visit to Netvibes, I also went over to another cool Web company here that I have been following for a while: Dailymotion.
Based in Paris and funded with $32 million from Atlas Venture and Partech International, the video-sharing site positions itself these days as kind of an anti-YouTube–better at programming, easier to use with [...]

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You might not have seen this video, which was made by employees at AOL France’s office after layoffs of 2,000 workers were announced last week (a story we broke here).
But you should. Even with sad news like this, it’s nice to see the spirit here and it is nicer still to have the Internet around [...]

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How much do we love this Morse Code guy in the Arizona desert–Chuck Adams, who is the eighth fastest in the world–in this video of what is a dying breed: the tappy-tapping ur-geek:

And Lenovo tries to grow a global business against competitors like Acer, IBM and Dell, although there is also a rural PC for [...]

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