Google’s 1st ever brand management director speaking at the LSE:
Pro: being able to feel some of the warm and fuzzy Google history like you’d worked there yourself
Con: was a bit of a book launch (but then we all knew that from the outset, so fair’s fair)
Surprise 1: hearing long-defunct internet brand names
Surprise 2: see below..
I heard Douglas Evans talk at the London School of Economics recently, about the early days at Google. It was a blast from the past, being reminded about how even companies like Google didn’t have any sections marked “revenue” in their business plans, mainly because they didn’t have business plans.
Doug’s “rein” was 1999 to 2005, and he was the 59th person to join Google and was their first director of marketing and brand management – he says he wanted to give Google a “human voice” from the outset. He also joked that employee number 58 was a massage therapist – hard to imagine now: no revenue, no revenue plans, but a masseuse on the payroll..
Doug’s talk was a book launch in disguise really, and I imagine the book is as full of enjoyable corporate folklore as he was – all interesting though. Their “under-promise and over-deliver” ethos started with customer number one, Netscape (ooh the nostalgia!). Google became the search provider for Netscape which multiplied Google’s server overhead seven-fold overnight. This was so far beyond expectations they shut Google.com down to better serve Netscape. Nice touch, but probably something you can only do when your own website doesn’t generate any revenue.
Hearing names like Inktomi was a trip down memory lane – once a giant of search, powering major global search engine results – I doubt I’ve thought about them in 7 or 8 years, when ten years ago they were a major destination for online advertisers, and I eagerly advertised across their network with over-optimised 468×60’s.
Possibly enshrined in folklore again, but we heard how Larry* was a big Apple fan at the start – maybe hard to believe now, but that was of course when Apple meant “alternative to a PC and windows” not “Android competitor”, something Douglas glossed over to stop fact getting in the way of a good yarn.
Something that interested me personally was hearing about their internationalisation headaches. SSL247 now has a (mere) 8 different country-specific sites, in 5 languages, and believe me, even as a ‘linguaphile’ that is enough sometimes to wish the whole world spoke just English. Or Flemmish, or an ancient Icelandic dialect, but just one language – you get the point. With just a UK and a US site, you are already dealing with two languages, cultures and conventions. Anyway, even the light-hearted daily image changes on Google posed problems – as you can’t put a Wright Brothers homage on Google Brazil like you can everywhere else in the world because the Brazilians feel they invented flight. I feel your pain Google!
That was the biggest surprise of this for me – Google’s search dominance isn’t that amazing given the sheer mass of brains and engineering talent they have, but their biggest triumph is their ability to take huge-scale internationalisation in their stride, and make their core products work globally. That to me is the real Google forte..
* Or Sergey, but definitely Sergey or Larry.
