Design for Interaction

As I am still new to London I though it was about time to dive into the local internet and tech scene. Luck has it that I live only 2 mins away from the so called Sillicon Roundabout at Old Street. Which indeed means there’s a lot of creativity and technology here. Wednesday night the TechHub invited Google’s Obi Felten to talk about Marketing for startups. Obi is Director of Consumer Marketing at Google, and that makes her resonsible for marketing Google’s products such as Search, Chrome, Maps to name a few. Quite a big job to have. She presented her scrappiness principles, I guess in other words a Quick and Dirty approach, although I missed her introduction.

Obi’s scrappiness principles

1. Use your biggest asset
2. Let others speak for you
3. Make things people want to share
4. Make things people care about
5. Make a model (scrappy) Make it scale (Epic)
6. Repeat. Steal with pride.

Obi gave plenty of examples of marketing done by Google. Even though she doesn’t like the word viral, when talking about things people want to share she refered to Google’s April Fools Day jokes. Such as Google Translate for Animals. Looking at what people care about, these would be events that have a big impact such as elections, or the Eurovision festival. The Royal Wedding was also big in the UK, and Google responded to that with a fairytale logo and some Google Maps specials. For example, dragging the Street View icon on a wedding lated location would turn this into a bride and groom.

When it comes to make a model (scrappy) and make it scale (epic) her advice was to pick either one, but nothing in between.

Some examples were the student project The Prado on Google Earth which turned into the Google Art project, including works in the Tate Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; and the Uffizi, Florence. Then there we the epic Chrome experiments, such as the beautiful interactive film The Wilderness Downtown, to the song of Arcade fire. Another example is the quickly launched think with google blog, which led to the additional online and offline ThinkQuarterly magazine. On repeating and stealing with pride Obi explains it’s of course exciting to come up with new ideas, but it isn’t always necessary. In reality it something really works, do it again. If it didn’t work, use your learnings to improve what you did, rather then starting with something entirely new. This is a message Obi really tries to convey at Google. An examples of a successful project that have been repeated regularly is Doodle 4Google, which has been around for 6 years, in 30 countries. In the UK every year 400.000 kids take part and 2/3 of uk schools are involved. Why stop?

Steal with pride relates for example to the inspiration taken from Obama’s absent voter video, which turned into the personalized christmas card, where christmas is cancelled because 1 person screws up. After introducing her scrappy principles Obi went on to answer questions about Google’s approach to marketing. Some questions & answers:

When Google pulls the plug on a project

Its always usage, Google is obsessed about statistics. If a product is new, it gets lots of users, but the question is does the interest stay.

Brand consistency along all products and countries

Google doesn’t have a brand book, only some basics eg on how to use the logo. We try to teach the marketing people how to do it, what can be done with the brand. The best way to learn is to have a discussion on what you can and cant do with the brand. Google is described as being very functional, and Obi is very happy that the brand is the product. The brand is very much linked to the product, if the product is amazing the brand goes up and vice versa. An example is the very bad initial reception of Street View in Germany. YouTube was never marketed as google brand because it had such a strong presence already. And Android is more a brand thats affiliated. It’s open source and therefore ‘the green robot can be dressed anyway you like’. Chrome is also a platform brand, which doesn’t necessarily look Google, the Google logo was dropped.

About online and offline advertising

The online ads are loved because they can be tracked.  Googles department maxes out online budget, and then comes tv. Tv works incredible well, because you can see immediate search impact when an advertisiment is aired. Outdoor is much harder, and is tracked trhough traditional questionnaires. It is very effective in awareness but not in product usage. Google doesn’t care about ad awareness, they care about product awareness. In the case of Chrome this was important and the chrome add was very simple. The reason was that the new EU laws forced browser choice so awareness was important.

About YouTube ads

Youtube had experiment for ages with ads, and opted for the solution where the user can skip pre roll if they want to. They had learned a lot of drop off happened with these ads, so they wanted to avoid that. It turned out that if the option to skip is not there, people less often remember the ad. It also turns out to be great A/B testing, the ad people do want to see is clearly the better ad.

About keeping up with competition

After successful launch, if competition appears how do you get your customers to stay? Obi’s answer is that Google generally doesn’t respond to competitors. But then mentions the Google Superbowl Ad, which was indeed a respons to the launch of Bing search engine.

Additionally, in competition it doesn’t work to copy features of the competition. You dont know which of the competitors features are successful, because you don’t have their metrics, so you can’t copy them.

Many more questions were waiting to be asked, but we were running out of time. Thanks to Obi Felten and TechHub for a really interesting talk!