THE PARAGRAPH
I have just retuned from an IPA 44 lecture by Google's UK head marketeer. I was invited by Mark Rowbotham and Nicky Roberts, the creatives from McCanns London who I recently both set up with google readers and are now avidly exploring the blogosphere.
Dan Copley, head of marketing of Google, UK, Ireland and Benelux countries was promoting the google way to I think mostly ad students from what I could make out from the packed audience. But where were the creatives? Besides Mark and Nicky, I didn’t see any I knew. It was a pity. It’s them of all people that need to see this articulate explanation of the net. Although Dan revealed that his lecture was his standard pitch to clients and agencies (no doubt mostly account and management and not creatives although I guess some might have all seen it on his travels - none have ever mentioned him in the past). He even personally said to me that the agencies are still slow to pick up what's going on. At their heart they're still clinging to the past and terrified of any real change to their old models. They have to thoroughly restructure themselves and understand the world is now flat and take this wonderful opportunity to try anything, quite literally anything when it comes to marketing and advertising through the explosion of the net and rapid growth of new technologies. Everything is up for grabs creatively and it's not going to slow. We are in for relentless change from now on. We need to become infomanics especially the idea creators who now have to embrace and entwine technology into the core of their ideas.
His talk was good and clearly influenced by permission marketing techniques, word of mouth and the long tail of which Chris Anderson was the only person he acknowledged. I would have thought he’d, like the blogosphere, credited a few people. I spoke to him afterwards and said that in so many words he was preaching from Seth Godin. (This latest and great post from him about promoting his book The Purple Cow)
In the Q & A I got a chance to ask a couple of questions. Why doesn’t google video search throughout the net, throughout all video sites and not just youtube and google video. I honestly can’t remember what his bland answer was but he successfully avoided the flaw in google's philosophy and no one pursued it any further. I then asked the current phone question. Is google working on a google phone? I got a sentence basically saying 'No comment' which I take as something is up even though blogosphere says they deny it. It was the first answer that didn’t sound like a pitch answer and I think surprised him from this audience after earlier in his lecture stressing that there were 2 billion mobilephones in the world as opposed to one billion net users. Something is up.
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