I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [148]
While Salar and Berkeley economist Hal Varian refined the bidding system, I thought about how we would sell the system itself. I compiled a spreadsheet comparing it to the original AdWords and to Overture. It looked very compelling on paper, but in reality it wasn't yet ready for public exposure. The gears and wires still showed through some parts of the interface, and some of the steps required to create an ad seemed counterintuitive. Birthed in the middle of the night, the newborn product could not yet survive in the cold competitive world into which it would soon be thrust. It needed to be wrapped in a user-friendly UI and given a name.
This time, the branding went faster. I convinced Salar we needed to make it easy to distinguish the new system from the original while planning for an endgame with just one AdWords system. I proposed "AdWords Select," because it would be easy to drop the "Select" when the original system shut down. He agreed and sold it to Larry and Sergey.
The new interface bothered me more. Overture had a simple three-step process for creating ads, an experience as comfortable and easy as driving a golf cart. AdWords Select was a MiG fighter, loaded with technical terms, incomprehensible gauges and dials, and a long checklist before your ads actually took off. I wanted us to have a shortcut with preset options, but Salar felt the granularity of the system made it powerful and that was its selling point.
Sheryl Sandberg, an economics wunderkind and former chief of staff at the Treasury Department, joined Google the week the new prototype went live. She was immediately handed responsibility for advertising customer support and the team of five people who managed that for Omid. One quit that day. Sheryl also wanted things simplified, but there was no working around Salar, who had developed a deep attachment to the product. Salar obsessed about the UI, the sign-up process, the auction mechanics, even the text of the emails going to users. His power as product manager over everything but the code was absolute. The system's thousand moving parts demanded total focus to keep things moving forward. Decisions had to be made quickly, often at four in the morning. Salar was in his element, running at full capacity and pushing the role of PM to a new and significant place.
Salar asked me for text to explain what set AdWords Select apart in a field dominated by Overture's promise of "pay for performance." Something that would stir the souls of advertisers and compel them to try a new system when Overture already worked well for them. Something in fewer than seven words.
"It's all about results," I suggested. The wording felt right. It emphasized the unequaled quality of our search and the importance of real return on investment. We slathered the tagline liberally over the sales materials we had in preparation. If we were going to win Yahoo and others, we needed to tout our strengths as a provider of both search and revenue.
Word on the street was that Yahoo's trial of Overture was not going well. One of our clients had heard Yahoo complaining about the high level of irrelevancy in Overture's listings. A few days later Overture overhauled their advertiser guidelines and introduced stricter controls on URLs, ad titles, and descriptions. "Given our commitment to providing a world-class search experience," Overture announced, "it's important that we provide highly relevant search results to our users." Evidently some users didn't want to just keep clicking until they found what they were looking for.
Overture's blithe confidence derived from the forty thousand advertisers whose listings appeared across their network of tens of thousands of client sites. Google