On the face of it, it’s not surprising Elias is such a spring chicken. Google is renowned for being a young, funky company to work for, which becomes apparent as soon as you set foot on any of the three floors that form its London HQ. The vast, open plan work spaces are dotted with traditional red telephone boxes (so staff can make free calls); camping tents (Elias says he hasn’t yet worked out why they are there), and mini kitchens, themselves the size of small offices, stocked with free food and drinks. There is also a games room, an immense office canteen (again, stocking free meals) and even a massage service, which judging by the fact some two dozen employees are taking advantage of it as we head past at 10am, is testament to the relaxed environment that Google prides itself on. The first question to Elias has to be; do employees ever leave the premises?
We all work long hours here, but that’s because people are excited about what they’re doing, he says. It’s fun working in this type of environment, very relaxed. E-Trade had the same vibe young and full of energy, although its offices were nowhere near as grand.
Elias was fresh out of France’s Insead business school, where he gained his MBA, when he joined Google. It was this business school experience that provided the stepping stone to his current role at Google, he says, although his seven years spent previous at E-Trade undoubtedly played a big hand too. Joining in 1999, straight out of university, Elias helped to establish the US brand’s then fledgling presence in the UK, working initially from small offices in Cambridge. Elias undertook a variety of marketing roles before he became more actively involved in what he calls running the front office, helping to build up the company’s sales operation and account management team. During his last 18 months at E-Trade, Elias ran its UK retail business.
When he joined Google he walked into a newly created role; the search engine already had a B2B marketing team, but nobody was assigned specifically to heading it up. His appointment, he says, is part of Google’s drive to invest more money in its UK team as it realises the massive potential that the market here presents. The UK is a huge market for Google, more advanced than that in the US, he says. It’s probably the most advanced market in terms of the level of ecommerce spend per capita 15 per cent of advertising is spent online in the UK and a huge amount is spent through ecommerce. This is a figure that only looks set to grow; according to a report published by WPP owned ad agency Group M last month the UK will finish 2008 with online accounting for 24.8 percent of ad spend and in 2009, predicts that online will for the first time ever overtake TV ad spend. We are, says Elias, entering a golden era for search engine marketing.
We see enormous potential still for going out and getting our message across to both small and large businesses in the UK, he enthuses. With the smaller businesses, there is still a significant proportion to target who aren’t on the Internet already, or who aren’t aware of the benefits of search marketing and there are businesses that fall into this category springing up all the time. But with the larger companies too, there is still a job to be done to convince some of them that they should be spending more money advertising online. We can show them what the results in doing that can be.
Elias acknowledges that talking to small start-ups and established brand names requires two entirely different tactics. To this end, he sees his job as being two pronged. To reach out to larger businesses, Elias says he works in a support marketing role alongside the account managers and sales teams who manage these bigger accounts. And to reach out to smaller companies, it’s about finding new ways to market directly to them.
This is the area of his job that Elias is particularly keen to talk about, since 2008 will see Google really ramp up its offering to the SME community. The products themselves are already in place; Adwords being its staple pay-per-click offering and Starterpages, launched last summer, now offering even the most technically challenged business the chance to have an online presence. Until now though, Google has relied largely on a ‘pull’ method of advertising, attracting advertisers who came looking for its products. Under Elias, this is set to change as the brand looks to increase its marketing efforts using more traditional mediums.
We spent the second half of 2007 expanding our print advertising and direct marketing and this year we’re going to build on that, he says. We want to reach beyond the early adopters of our product and educate a new audience who know what Google is, but don’t know what we can do for them in terms of promoting their brand. Elias refuses to be drawn into the specifics of Google’s forthcoming activity, but says mediums like direct mail will be given much more of a push. One detail he will reveal however, is that a campaign due to launch imminently will feature case studies of existing businesses that use Google’s Adwords product.
I want to bring case studies to the fore as part of our marketing mix in 2008. It will be an evolution of the simpler creative we’ve been using to date where we’ve had text explaining the product and a voucher to get you started. (Google has used this creative in trade press campaigns in the past.)
Elias will also be looking to expand on 2007’s co-marketing efforts. We think about where small businesses are going to be they have bank accounts and insurance and many have a website that is hosted by somebody, so we’ve talked to those players to help them improve their offering to these smaller businesses. Plus we make sure we’re at events where we know smaller advertisers will be.
This is well and good, but small advertisers often complain that because they don’t qualify in size for their own Google account manager they find it difficult to communicate with the search engine giant over Adwords queries. We realise we need to do more work in this area, admits Elias. For smaller advertisers we are looking to build on the levels of support we can offer via an online medium. This year we’re looking to roll out a programme to new clients which will give them pointers on how they can optimise their campaigns.
With the pay-per-click model dominating Google’s marketing strategy in 2008, is Elias worried about the plethoric rise in popularity of search engine optimisation? The Internet is awash with advice on how to achieve successful natural search listings meaning SEO is becoming less and less of a ‘black art’, and studies suggest that 80 per cent of people trust left hand search listings more than right hand ones. Furthermore, at the most recent B2B Marketing Great Debate, ‘SEO versus pay-per-click advertising’, the former came out on top as the marketer’s search engine tool of choice.
I see the opposite trend happening, he argues. We continue to see strong growth on the pay-per-click side of things and whilst we understand that people want to be high up in the natural search listings, we’re keen to demonstrate the value of being on the right hand side as well. SEO can take time and effort and we tend to talk to the bigger businesses about it because they are better equipped to do it. Pay-per-click is relevant to all business sizes and we have any number of case studies that demonstrate the value of it.
It’s still early days for Elias; he admits he’s only just got around to figuring his way around Google’s immense and slightly chaotic offices. But clearly he’s looking forward to driving the B2B marketing team forwards. I’m just excited to be tasked with constantly finding new ways to get the Google message in front of businesses and to be able to do it in such a great environment. The other week I came into the offices and tripped over a dog an employee had decided to bring along for the day that just sums up what it’s like to work here.
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