Search Giant Needs to Boost Marketing to Support New Products
By Michael Learmonth
Published: October 03, 2008
NEW
YORK (AdAge.com) -- Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have
long said they won't sully Google's page with advertising. But the
American landscape? That's another matter.
The WSJ weighs in on the
ongoing re-think taking place at Google over marketing. Mainly, the
story is that Google is going to start doing some -- and that includes
some pretty non-digital approaches, such as roadside billboards to get
people to try using the search giant for things other than search.
As Ad Age reported last month,
those 800-GOOG-411 billboards were the work of Seattle-based Creature,
which also did campaigns for Gmail and Google Maps. Google has been
flirting with a number of agencies since it brought on former Ogilvy
& Mather exec Andy Berndt to lead marketing efforts last year. At
some point, it seems likely Google will want to do some marketing for
it's Web browser, Chrome.
In
that same story, Ad Age also noted that Google seems to favor
independent shops. The company is already working with Weiden &
Kennedy on an outdoor and online campaign in Japan and has tapped it
for some U.S. work around Google TV Ads. It tapped Toy, New York, to
create a YouTube how-to-guide called a "Tubetorial" that launched
earlier this year and Naked Communications is also said to have worked
with Google. It has also reached out to the New York offices of Taxi.
The
bottom line is that Google's growth is slowing down. Word-of-mouth and
free media was enough to grow the company into a search powerhouse but
Google is going to have to spend more than its current $20 million a
year on marketing if it wants to move in on big spenders like Microsoft
and Apple with new products such as Google Apps and the G1 phone,
respectively.