• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I look back on that as a quarter-hour well spent.

A brand is the sum of all the "touch points" you have with a product or service—your interactions, your impressions, your expectations, your unplanned casual encounters. Brand managers strive to make those touch points consistent. An obsessive brand manager at Google would have reviewed every pixel on our web page, every punctuation mark in our customer emails, every word in our sales literature, and every note of our switchboard's hold music. That's pretty much what I did. It absorbed an inordinate amount of energy, and I knew I couldn't apply myself at that level to managing a thousand Google sub-brands.

"Why don't we create a thousand Google sub-brands?" Sergey asked me a short time later. "That way we can give users all the things they like about our competitors, except with really good search results. We could do a sweepstakes site like iWon or a portal site or natural language–style queries, only with Google on the back end running the actual searches."

His logic appeared sound: if you could get all the benefits offered by competitors plus a search engine that actually worked, why would you use anyone else? I pointed out that with our limited resources, promoting a dozen or a hundred other brands would be counterproductive. Unless he wanted to hire more brand managers? Sergey backed down, but he revisited the idea anytime a competitor appeared to be gaining market share with search technology inferior to ours.

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.

Let a Hundred Banners Bloom

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