NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Like many successful brands born of the digital age, Google hasn’t been known for advertising, and certainly not TV advertising. So its appearance in this year’s Super Bowl was something of a surprise. This is, you’ll recall, the company whose founders vowed that it would be a cold day in hell before they’d do a TV commercial and whose chief executive called advertising “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.”
What Jesus-like figure at which of Google’s ad agencies had converted the company to a big-ticket TV advertiser? Had Google started to work with McGarryBowen?
Erin Mulvehill
Google Five: (l.) Tristan Smith, J. Smith, Anthony Cafaro, Michael Chang and Johnathan Jarvis.
No, the Super Bowl spot, “Parisian Love,” was created in-house by the “Google 5,” a handful of students recruited from ad and design schools. The 5 program is an experiment launched last year by the Google Creative Lab and its executive creative director, Robert Wong. The company sent a call out to 12 schools searching for interesting talent who would work inside the Creative Lab for a year and then be sent out unto the industry. So, with the Google 5, the company gets new creative blood and the industry gets young talent that is schooled in Google, and, by extension, the post-digital/new advertising way — tech-forward, open-source, collaborative, and smart.
Mr. Wong says the 5 initiative was motivated by two things: “getting fresh, awesome talent in the Creative Lab,” and “fueling the ecosystem of the industry.”
“It feels like every agency I talk to wants more digital expertise,” said Mr. Wong. “The thinking was that, ‘Hey we have great talent that can come in and play with all the tools here and then agencies will get people that feel confident about all the tools at their disposal.’ And of course it works for us because that way they know our tools and we can participate in the whole ecosystem.”
Mr. Wong and the Lab team received around 400 applications for the five spots in the program. The original plan was to recruit a designer, an art director, a writer, a filmmaker and a programmer, but after vetting the candidates in a process Mr. Wong likens to “casting a reality show,” the team selected two writers, Tristan Smith and J. Smith; two designers, Anthony Cafaro and Jonathan Jarvis; and a programmer, Michael Chang.
The team stood out for being talented and “multidextrous” and, in some cases, for their self-initiated creations: Mr. Jarvis wrote and directed an animated web film called “The Crisis of Credit Visualized” that explained the Wall Street meltdown in a simple, graphically compelling way and that’s been viewed over a million times online; Mr. Smith, while nominally a writer, impressed with a series of 3-D photographs he created as a side project. But the whole team demonstrated the key characteristic of, er, “Googliness,” which Mr. Wong describes as an amalgam of “ambition, humility, altruism, entrepreneurialism and sense of scale — big thinkers who feel like they can really impact a lot of people.”
In June 2009, the 5 arrived at Google and were immersed immediately in every project that the Lab had cooking and in the aggressively open, collaborative Google working style.
“It wasn’t like, ‘OK, here’s your little project and we’ll work on the important things,’” said Mr. Jarvis. “They were like, ‘We need minds on this problem, you guys come and work on it.’ So we were working on the same projects as the creative leads and working right alongside them; it was up to us to sink or swim, and to contribute as much as we could.”
Within the group and in the larger Lab environment, “there’s very little screen privacy,” Mr. Cafaro said. “There was always someone over your shoulder saying, ‘Ooh, what if we tried this?’” Fresh out of school, the 5 noted that this kind of collaborative environment was a significant change from their experiences to date. “I think ad school trained you to be very competitive; there’s this kind of killer instinct they try and create in you,” said Tristan Smith. “You’re always pitching your work against teams. I sort of had to reprogram myself here.”
The 5 ended up working on a wide range of projects, from launching the Nexus phone — contributing to all facets of the product including packaging, pre-roll ads on Hulu and the boot-up animation on the phone — to the Google Christmas card (”everything here scales!” said Tristan Smith).
And, of course, search.
How it all began
What eventually became “Parisian Love” and a Super Bowl hit started out as a key Google brief, to “remind people what they love about Google search,” but also to showcase some engine particulars they might not know about. “There were all these features that the engineers showed me that I think no one really knew about, like being able to type your flight number right into the search bar without going to an airline’s site,” said Mr. Wong. “So it was about showing people how they could search in other ways and how empowering that could be.” Mr. Wong said several different ideas were floated until something caught — the idea that it wasn’t just one search and one answer, but a lifetime of searches. The 5 team ran with the idea of a search as representative of a moment in a life, inspired by Mr. Wong’s maxim that “the best results don’t show up in a search engine, they show up in your life.”
They worked to keep the idea pared down to keep the resulting spot “like theater of the mind,” and presented it to the search-marketing team. Mr. Wong said, “Everyone loved it and wanted to share it.” The spot appeared online in late 2009. It was an engineer who originally suggested putting the ad on the Super Bowl. “For Google, it’s a crazy idea,” Mr. Wong said. “At the end of the day, the founders loved the spot and they were excited by the idea of more people getting to see it. It was a one off, it was random. But it was surprising and that’s what made it so cool.”
The tenure of the original 5 came to an end this June, at which time the Lab ended up hiring Tristan Smith. Messrs. Cafaro and Jarvis. J. Smith got a job at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland and Mr. Chang is a free-agent programmer who recently created the much-discussed “Google Doodle” that augured the September launch of Google Instant. He is currently working on projects for Barnes & Noble.
Up next: another group of “talented and nice” polymaths that includes Grant Gold, a designer out of School of Visual Arts; Chris Trumbull and Natalie Hammel, writers from VCU; George Michael Brower, a technologist from UCLA Design Media Arts; and Chris Lauritzen, a designer/”wild card” from Art Center College of Design’s Media Design program.
Mr. Wong says the fresh 5 have been thrown into a range of projects covering search, Google TV, Chrome and other undisclosed ventures.
“The Lab is very flat and open,” said Mr. Lauritzen, “which gives it a kind of chaos that can feel a little overwhelming at times. It’s also what makes it such a cool place to be, especially for someone learning how the creative industry works. There is a lot of amazing stuff going on, and it’s all accessible.” Already, Mr. Brower has contributed to one of the creative highlights of the year, interactive video “The Wilderness Downtown,” a collaboration between director Chris Milk and Google’s Aaron Koblin, The Lab, B-Reel, Radical Media and designer/developer Mr. Doob.
The Arcade Fire coup and the Super Bowl spot are part of a growing body of work out of the Lab created in collaboration with an array of partners, agency and otherwise. The Lab built on the success of “Parisian Love” with more Search Stories, working with Pixar to create a “Toy Story 3″-themed spot and launching a web tool allowing the public to create their own search story.
Quite a track record
Much of the Lab’s recent work has centered on the Chrome browser. In May, the group worked with BBH, New York, on “Speed Tests,” which pitted the browser against the likes of sound waves and a potato-gun-fired potato in a series of real-time, in-camera demonstrations.
It’s an admirable track record for a creative entity just 3 years old. Former Ogilvy co-President Andy Berndt was recruited in September 2007 to build the new unit; Mr. Wong, an ex-Arnold exec creative director and VP-creative at Starbucks, joined in 2008. But this is Google, after all, so when Mr. Wong tells you the ultimate goal for the Lab is to “win the Nobel Peace Prize,” both of you can keep a straight face.
The Lab is now a 50-person unit, working closely with Google marketing and with a growing roster of agencies including BBH, Cutwater and Johannes Leonardo among others.
Mr. Wong offers a long and a short version of the Lab’s mandate. “The Google Creative Lab is a small team that strives to rethink marketing across every kind of media, currently existing or not — with Google as its sole client. Our mission is to ‘remind the world what it is that they love about Google.’ Our job is to manage and steward the brand, find new ways to communicate the company’s innovations, intentions and ideals, and do work of which we can all be proud. We want people ambitious and crazy enough to think we can actually change the world.” The short version: “Do epic shit.”
The part about reminding people why they love Google, though, can be considered one of today’s more interesting brand challenges: to take a company that was built on and whose name represents one thing — search — and craft a brand persona as the company expands in size and scope. And occasionally scares people. “It’s human nature to root for the underdog,” said Mr. Wong. “When you become successful, it’s about, how do you exceed people’s expectations?”
The Lab, said Mr. Wong, wants to take the processes and philosophies that made Google’s engineers successful — intense focus on the consumer and user experience, flat operating structure, focus on prototyping and on an iterative process, scale and tech innovation — and apply them to the marketing process. If Mr. Wong could push further, industry-wide, he said it would be toward “more listening, less talking; more feeling, less thinking, more doing, less promising, more inventing, less polishing.”
Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles Rock Twitter! (Along With Lost Powerpuff Girl Lady Gaga)by Simon Dumenco Published:September 17, 2010
A few notes about this week’s Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart, a collaboration between Advertising Age and What the Trend:
Sports brands dominate our list this week, with three of the seven spots going to, basically, balls in flight. The NFL and European soccer (football) loomed large, while the U.S. Open became a global Twitter obsession as well with a lot of help from Spanish tennis superstar Rafael Nadal.
The MTV Video Music Awards top our list this week. The VMAs got a huge boost from the raw-meat-dress-wearing Lady Gaga as well as a couple of other pop-cultural icons who sort of became a meme of their own, namely …
An Indonesian TV station helped set off a surge of Powerpuff Girl memories.
Kanye West and Taylor Swift. Both performed at the VMAs, which caused endless speculation about potential backstage weirdness between them, given that Kanye notoriously interrupted Taylor’s 2009 VMA acceptance speech. Kanye renewed the controversy by apologizing (”I’m sorry, Taylor”) on Twitter recently, and now I just wish they’d hook up already and make adorable, arrogant babies together.
You’ve gotta love the Twittersphere for its left-field obsessions. Supercute superheroes the Powerpuff Girls — Blossom, Butttercup and Bubbles — improbably make our Top 10 this week thanks to people tweeting their favorite memories of the iconic cartoon series in the wake of its airing on Indonesian TV. By the way, effective immediately, I’m launching a new meme — #PowerpuffGaga — in an attempt to spread the word that Lady Gaga was a Powerpuff Girl in her youth, but was cut from the team. It’s true; I swear!
People are tweeting about their favorite memories of the Powerpuff Girls and their favorite characters from the show. It originally started trending over the weekend because the show aired on TRANS7, one of Indonesia’s TV stations.
Subtrends include: Powerpuff
6
Google
1
2,529
Google has launched a new Doodle on British and Irish platforms to celebrate the 120th anniversary of mystery writer Agatha Christie’s birth. Google also just implemented various ajax features, including instant search (as you type) and ajax paging.
Subtrends include: Agatha Christie, Google Instant, Agatha
8
Restart
1
2,153
As a reaction to Restart trending, Twitter users are expressing their dislike of the Brazilian band. “Cala Boca Coloridas” means “Shut Up, Colorful Girls” in Portuguese. It refers to the mostly teenage fans of Restart, which is part of a new “colourful rock” movement whose fans wear gaudy clothes and weird haircuts. Meanwhile, fans of the band are expressing their appreciation for it and its members.
For more information about What the Trend, visit the WTT FAQ. And check out WTT’s Week in Review, compiled by its in-house editors and covering an expanded general list of Top 20 trends (including hashtag trends) here.
Simon Dumenco is the “Media Guy” media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter@simondumenco.
Besides his over all yumminess, yes, I said yumminess, and I feel okay with it being tied to Don Draper and Mad Men ! There’s enough crushes including “man crushes” to make it okay!
New Insights: ‘Mad Men’ Is Tops In Q Score Report by Wayne Friedman, Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 4:13 PM
More emotional/involvement measures for TV shows reveal new insights not provided with standard viewership numbers. A new metric from two media research companies — The Q Score Company and General Sentiment — says AMC’s “Mad Men” is tops among all TV shows when it comes to “involvement.” Fox’s “Family Guy” follows in second place.
The report, titled “The Prime-Time Television Audience Evaluation Report,” ranked “Mad Men” with a 7.5 “involvement index score” to the 7.3 for “Family Guy” for the week of Sept. 6-12.
Heavily factoring into the score is online buzz, social networking messaging and other TV viewer-generated digital content. The data combines General Sentiment’s Involvement Index, which measures the online discussion/word-of-mouth generated by prime-time TV shows, with Q Scores’ Emotional Bonding Q, which determines a program’s ability to hold onto its most important viewers over time.
After “Family Guy” came CW’s “Gossip Girl” and NBC’s “The Office,” both with a 7.1 score. Fifth and sixth place went to Fox’s “The Simpsons” (6.9) and ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” (6.9), respectively. Several cable shows followed after this: HBO’s “Entourage” (6.5); TNT’s “Leverage” (6.2); A&E’s “Obsessed” (6.1); and Comedy Central’s “Futurama” (6.1).
Overall, the report says 12 of the 13 highest-ranked shows were from broadcast networks. The average for prime-time broadcast shows was a 4.4 involvement score; for cable prime-time, a 3.1.
George Zoeckler, senior analyst at General Sentiment, stated: “It will be interesting to see what happens when the broadcast shows premiere next week. I’ve been especially surprised by the strong response to CW’s “Nikita.” It’s generating a remarkable amount of discussion for a new show and has a real chance to be a breakout hit this fall.”
Until 1 week ago, I had never even seen an Ikea. I have several Swedish friends who always talk about it, but their national pride has them talking up anything that happens to be of Swedish decent - thus allowing me to discount the praise they had for Ikea. Man, was that a mistake.
Last week I was in Orlando meeting an old friend and had some downtime before meeting him. For some strange reason, I decided to check out the Ikea that everyone raves about. As I pull up I remember laughing to myself. I pulled into a parking lot that I’m 95% never ends and parked next to a gigantic, concrete Swedish flag:
After getting out of my car I waited for tram to come pick me up from my section of the parking lot. After about 5 minutes, I realized they don’t offer tram service (which - by the way - I can’t determine if that’s very-European or un-European of them). I walked in, was greeted by several staff members and stumbled my way to the lone elevator - completely unsure where it was leading me. After walking through some double doors I found myself in a massive showroom. As I walked I found room after room, each with its own set of hip decor and furniture. After seeing some of the cool designs I decided to look at the desks. (Actually, it was a miracle that I found them. This place is huge!) After browsing the desks, I finally found one I wanted and spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out how to buy it. The tag instructed me to go to the self-service area and it had a few numbers that I had to remember until I got there. I decided to keep walking when I got a call from my friend who was calling to let me know he was ready to be picked up.
I briskly walked through the halls of the showroom trying to hurry to the checkout. After about 10 minutes of near-jogging through I found the self-service area/warehouse: a huge room the resembled a Sams Club. I sped past the loading buggies and searched for the desk I picked out. Once I found it, I realized I couldn’t do much without the loading buggy and decided I’d have to call off the purchase. If not for the time-crunch though, I would have a brand new Ikea desk.
So it’s been a week since this venture, and I can’t remember how many people I’ve talked to about the visit. I’ve come to realize a few things about the brand and what really happened last week. I remember blogging a while back about Starbucks and how they use experiential marketing work wonders for them. If you missed it, I argued that by creating such a intimate and comforting atmosphere in each Starbucks store, they connect the brand with all five of the consumer’s senses. It becomes The Starbucks Experience, instead of just going out for a cup of coffee. Well, Ikea has done a very similar thing.
I’ve never been too big into decorating - and after living two years in a fraternity house I’m definitely not too picky when it comes to furniture. So why have I been speaking so highly of Ikea; a furniture and home decor store? Why did I feel like I needed to buy a brand new desk when I have a functioning desk at home? Think about it, I almost made one of the largest impulse buys of my life just because of the rush I got after walking into this showroom. The design and layout of the multi-room setup got me excited from the get go. I was excited enough to say - ‘What do I need?…Well, it’d be kinda cool to have a new desk.’ I was so impressed that my Facebook status became “Nick is obsessed with Ikea” after being inside for FIVE minutes. (And I received several comments on that very status update supporting my newly-formed Ikea obsession.) When it comes down to it, if it weren’t for the time crunch I was in, I’d have that new desk set up in my room right now.
So do it - check out Ikea. It’s a very impressive place with something for everyone - and even more for homeowners. The Tampa store opens in a couple weeks and it’s supposed to be nutty. Pay attention to the news, I’m sure they will be all over it. Why? I’m pretty sure hundreds of people are planning on camping out overnight (and it’s rumored they may camp over several nights) just to be there for the grand opening. Anyone have an extra sleeping bag?
