2009 August, 3rd

Liliana Dumitru-Steffens

This is something you do not see every day: Google is leasing four billboards in New York (West Side Highway), San Francisco (Highway 101), Chicago (Eisenhower Expressway) and Boston (Massachusetts Turnpike) to promote its bundle of business apps. Starting today Google will display a different message each weekday till the end of the month.

Google has been promoting its “apps” package since 2007, but only recently realized it needed a more aggressive sales pitch. The company started promoting its campaign on YouTube and on other Google sites and it also updated its Google apps page for this purpose, with a “spread the word” message: “Join the movement. Spread the word. Go Google.”

“The billboards tell the story of an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually – you guessed it – goes Google,” said Andy Berndt, managing director of Google Creative Lab.

I doubt that highway billboards are the best way to advertise a bundle of apps, but Google has no plan to advertising its business applications in other offline venues. The move is received online with mixed feelings. Dana Oshiro if ReadWriteWeb titles her entry: Google Apps Campaign: How Not to Influence IT Experts.

“Google Apps enthusiasts are asked to influence the very people who are already more qualified to make IT-related infrastructural decisions. In other words, if you’ve ever seen a non-technical employee tell an IT administrator how to do his/her job, the outcome probably wasn’t pretty.” – she notes. The points are valid, but they do not mirror the main reasons why the campaign is not necessarily the most brilliant move made by Google.

With this campaign Google hopes to persuade Microsoft clients to switch to its services. While the company never needed advertising to promote its search engine, counting on word-of-mouth and free media instead, almost all its other attempts to push other services needed other strategies – including Google using its own AdWords platform as a promotion channel.

The problem is not necessarily the channel, but the message. According to Google about 1.75 million businesses use its online applications, but most of them use the free version. That’s a small fraction of how many companies license Microsoft’s software, so the message “Join the movement” as positive as it sounds, is somehow deceiving. There is no “movement” to join. Companies “go Google” for economical reasons: the recession caused financial difficulties in many companies that are trying to cut costs through “cloud computing.” Google’s billboard campaign if successful, will not persuade through its message. There is a real need of cheap business solutions.

The question is: would you go Google, and why?

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About the Author

Liliana Dumitru-Steffens is public relations consultant for Pamil Visions PR. She writes for Everything PR since January 2009. Previously she worked for My-tronic GmbH and Unilever Romania. Email Liliana at lsteffens [at] pamil-visions [dot] net.

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