Authors: Douglas Edwards
The Google directory service never proved a great success. We prominently displayed it on the homepage as a dark green link, then demoted it to a tab above the search box. It never drew much usage. You can still find it in the cutout bin of discounted and little-used services listed on the More Google Products page.
That's another nice thing about keeping features from becoming "real" products. Nobody misses them when they're gone.
Legend has it that Google grew entirely by word of mouth. That's not quite true. We didn't mind running online ads; we just didn't want to pay for them. We established barter arrangements with Netscape and Go2Net, so we—I—needed to come up with banner ads to run on their sites. We had a few banners that a freelance agency had created before I came onboard. One featured a scary-looking voodoo doll and a disclaimer that Google employed no black magic to get results. It felt off target.
Shari didn't want us to be embarrassed by our first public marketing campaign. She carefully laid out a plan, a budget, and a schedule for developing our banner ads. We would do market research, analyze it, hire a hungry young agency for under a hundred thousand dollars, write a creative brief, get sign-off on the mockups, go into production, and then launch the ads—all within seven weeks. It was a breakneck, hurry-up, no-huddle timetable, but given Google's penchant for speed, Shari felt emboldened to rush the process. The ads would be ready practically overnight by traditional marketing standards.
Sergey also wanted the ads overnight, but he applied an even more traditional standard: he gave us twenty-four hours. He agreed that the voodoo ads had not been ideal, but he wasn't convinced that our promotion needed to be part of some big brand-identity initiative. If we wanted new ads, that was fine with him.
"How many can you have by tomorrow?" Sergey looked at me when he said it, since I was the online marketing manager. "Why don't you start with a hundred banners? That should give us enough genetic diversity that we can see what's effective and what's not. Then throw out the losers and come up with a hundred more like the ones that work." I had read
Ogilvy on Advertising
to prepare for my career. Sergey had read
On the Origin of Species.
We didn't need to hire an agency, Sergey argued. After all, Google had a bunch of marketing people, and if we couldn't write code, certainly we could write ads. And then we could optimize the images and animate the GIFs. That wasn't coding, that was just formatting. "Why don't you just teach yourself Photoshop and the HTML you need?" he asked. I had been working on my software skills, but I had a long way to go to meet Google's exacting standards. Sergey reluctantly agreed to let me hire a freelance designer, but he wasn't happy about spending money on contractors.
Cindy dropped heavy hints that Sergey had begun doubting the wisdom of hiring marketing staff, since apparently we couldn't actually do anything for ourselves. "You need to recalibrate, Doug," she counseled me privately. "You need to stop worrying about potential problems and obstacles and just figure out how to get things done." The incompletes on my Google transcript apparently hadn't gone completely unnoticed. If I couldn't get these ads produced quickly, my days at Google would be numbered, and the number was going to be a very small one.
The "hundred banners assignment" became an inflection point for me. I threw myself at the task, spewing out every idea that crossed by mind onto a yellow legal pad. I brought in John O'Neill—a gifted copywriter with a sardonic streak and a fondness for Abba—to help develop concepts.
"Our founders still get carded," one of my animated ads began. "Our Ops guy is a brain surgeon," said the next panel. "Our chef cooked for the Grateful Dead," it continued. "No wonder we search differently."
It was John, though, who came up with Sergey's favorite line. "The last unbastardized search engine," he wrote. Sergey had a fondness for the word "bastard."
When the mockups of the first ads came back from our freelance artist, the company toasted them with an email flame circle, scorching them from all sides. Most of the comments centered on issues of aesthetics and were easily accommodated with minor changes. Sergey had only one strong objection. The artist had illustrated the line "They really, really like us" with a stock photo showing a stereotypical movie star in dark glasses and head scarf, holding a long cigarette holder. Sergey hated everything about the image, from the artificiality of the obnoxious Hollywood personality to the way the picture promoted smoking.
Larry was even more blunt. "I won't run cigarette ads," he declared.
Feedback trickled in for days. Sergey didn't like a particular shade of green we had used. Cindy thought an ad looked too much like a competitor's. One model was too young. Another too old. I unleashed Sergey's own logic like a sheep dog to contain the flock of ad hoc critics.
"It's unlikely we'll ever come up with fifty ads that all of us like," I pointed out. "And there's no guarantee that if we do, they will be the ads that our users also like. That's why we're testing these."
"Very good point," Sergey agreed. "We don't need everyone to be happy." But still the critiquing continued unabated.
"Too slow."
"Too many stripes."
"Too many words."
After another week of flung arrows, Sergey weighed in again.
"We should try a bunch of these out," he said, "and see how they perform. We're wasting time by not running them and getting the ultimate feedback—clickthrough. Just run them. It's not a TV campaign. Run the hundred banners, see how they do, and then revise them."
I was glad Sergey had spoken. It was time for the banner bus to leave the depot.
That's when Shari, the offline brand manager, threw herself under it. "Sergey," she said, "I agree they don't all have to be perfect, but we risk hurting our brand if we don't set a quality standard. This is why companies hire experienced marketing people. Please ... trust our judgment."
Now I was caught between Shari, whose professional opinion I valued, and Sergey, who was advocating for my right to test ideas in the marketplace. I made the quick changes I agreed with and gave a green light to the rest.
The trades had been negotiated. The creative work was done. All that remained was placing our ads on partners' web pages and seeing what worked best. That's when I learned that every dot-com didn't run like Google. The people our partners put in charge of managing their advertising inventory were intentionally recalcitrant or unintentionally incompetent, or both. One site wouldn't commit to dates for delivering the impressions promised in the contract we had just signed. Another refused to return repeated calls and email messages. Even Netscape couldn't confirm they had actually run any of the millions of ads they were supposed to have delivered for us.
When the ads did run, the results were disappointing. I wasn't expecting much because I had seen clickthrough rates (CTRs) dropping across the web.
*
Only zero-point-five percent of those viewing online ads had been clicking on them when I left the
Merc.
I assumed the rate had continued to decline. So when our ads started running, I was skeptical they'd reach the three percent CTR Sergey had set as a goal. They didn't. Most of our banners pulled less than three-tenths of a percent—a disaster in Sergey's eyes. He demanded we stop the ads immediately because he felt we were wasting our inventory. In his view, we should substitute new creative for any ad performing at under one percent once we had shown it five thousand times. Given that we had tens of millions of impressions to use up, that would have meant creating and managing thousands of banner ads, since even successful ads would "burn out" over time as they became overexposed.
Moreover, I didn't trust the numbers our partners gave us. Netscape claimed one ad had a 476 percent CTR, which, being impossible, skewed the metrics for our entire campaign. I asked our own logs-analysis team to verify the traffic our ads actually drove, but no one had time to hand-code our banners to make that possible.
Each day I would gather the reports for every ad we had run on every partner site, plug them into a spreadsheet, and hand-deliver printouts to Larry and Sergey. I'd highlight the best performers and let them know which ads we'd be rotating in or out. The association with actual data seemed to improve my standing in the eyes of our founders. They scanned every cell in the spreadsheet and asked me why certain ads were up or down or performed differently on different sites. I didn't always have the answers, but I could point to the numbers and speculate. I became a convert to the power of data persuasiveness and swore I would make all my future arguments only when I could back them up with real-world metrics.
With attention now focused on the ads' performance instead of my own, the pressure from above eased somewhat. We had created our first hundred ads quickly and cheaply and the production costs were going down. Our most effective ads featured nothing more than a white background, a search box, a logo, and some text ("The answer's in here"; "Who are you looking for?"), and webmaster Karen and Wacom
†
wonder Dennis Hwang could crank those out in fifteen minutes. I had actually accomplished something to justify my existence in the eyes of our engineering overlords.
The shelves in my cupboard of confidence were no longer empty but for crumbs and cobwebs. Still, each night as I tucked my ego tight behind shuttered lids, I could just make out the sounds of a grindstone rubbing against a metal blade, slow muffled footsteps, and the whistle of an ax falling toward a wooden block.
It kept me on my toes.
W
HAT DID IT
feel like—the experience of coming to work at Google when it was fewer than sixty people? Let me give you a few impressions. Before I started at Google, I had never said any of the following on the job:
"Yes, I see the eight shelves of programming books. Where do we keep the dictionaries? No, I can't just print out the words as I look them up online."
"Is it a good idea to have all those bikes leaning against the fire door?"
"Sorry. I was aiming for Salar. Did I get the printer? Super soakers are really inaccurate at more than five feet."
"Who do I ask if I have questions about Windows? No one? Really?"
"Wow, Larry. Who trashed your office? Well, it's just that ... uh, never mind."
"Wouldn't it be easier to buy rollerblade wheels that are already assembled?"
"Is there any way to set the sauna for more than half an hour?"
"Is it okay to go into the women's locker room to steal some towels?"
"Oh, sorry. Didn't realize anyone was napping in here."
"See, you knock down more garbage cans if you bounce the ball instead of just rolling it straight at them."
"It's in the area behind the coffee-can pyramid, right across from where the Big Wheel is usually parked."
"I tried to book ninety minutes, but the schedule was full. So I only got an hour. Could you focus on legs and feet? I think I pulled something running this morning."
I needed to stretch. I'd been staring at my screen for two hours thinking up new banner ads, responding to users, and working on an "email-a-friend" program that Sergey thought had the potential to go viral.
"Your user name is not valid," I wrote for one of the program's error messages. "It may have a bad character. That's not a reflection on you." I was getting a little pixel punch-drunk and it was affecting my judgment.
I left my cubicle in the marketing pod and meandered off in search of glucose and caffeine. Google was growing. The company was still contained in a single building when the millennium began, but the offices lining the outer edges of the Googleplex had all been occupied.
One day a crew of Samoans, their thick biceps shrink-wrapped in coconut-leaf tattoos, arrived to fill the open space with cubicles. The area was now partitioned by a maze of cheaply acquired, mismatched fabric panels, the flotsam and jetsam of the dot-coms that had suddenly started sinking all around us. Fast-food toys, manipulative puzzles, empty soda cans, and geek-chic objets d'Nerf feathered the work nests. Ratty couches shambled through open areas and settled on brightly colored crop circles cut into the carpeting, offering lumpy, coffee-stained comfort and filling in for laundry hampers. I brought in a couple of four-foot-high inflatable dinosaurs and left them to graze on the new flooring.
Walking the gray-padded arroyos, I glimpsed many heads silhouetted by code-filled screens. It may sound deadly dull, but there was an energy to the place—conveyed in quiet conversations, snatches of laughter, the squeak of dry-erase markers on rolling whiteboards, exercise balls bouncing, and electric scooters humming down hallways.
Yoshka ambled past, ears flapping, collar jingling. Someone flopped on a couch, took off his skates, and dropped them on the floor. Someone ground coffee beans for an afternoon espresso. A pool cue slapped a cue ball. It passed the aggression on, smacking an eight ball loitering in its path and sending it into the deep funk of a faux leather pocket.
I sensed the tension of potential—building and bound only by time—like the feeling of crossing the tracks in front of an idling train. Great efforts were being made, and the energy they required rippled outward seeking physical release.