Google looks to users' needs

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Simon Canning | November 17, 2008

THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.

Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.

Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.

"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.

"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."

He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.

He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.

But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.

"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.

At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."

The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.

"It's an interesting question," Smith says.

"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.

"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organisation that has always done that and been very successful at it.

"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."

Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.

Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.

Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.