google 5

By: Teressa Iezzi Published: September 27, 2010

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Erin Mulvehill

Google Five: (l.) Tristan Smith, J. Smith,Anthony Cafaro, Michael Chang and JohnathanJarvis.

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Meet the Google 5, the Team Behind'Parisian Love' Super Bowl SpotSearch Giant Finds Fresh, Tech-Forward Talent in Ad and Design Students Recruitedto Work With Its Creative Lab

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Like many successful brands born of the digital age, Google hasn'tbeen known for advertising, and certainly not TV advertising. So its appearance in this year's SuperBowl was something of a surprise. This is, you'll recall, the company whose founders vowed that itwould be a cold day in hell before they'd do a TV commercial and whose chief executive calledadvertising "the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America."

What Jesus-like figure at which of Google's ad agencies had converted the company to a big-ticketTV advertiser? Had Google started to work with McGarryBowen?

No, the Super Bowl spot, "Parisian Love," was createdin-house by the "Google 5," a handful of studentsrecruited from ad and design schools. The 5 program isan experiment launched last year by the GoogleCreative Lab and its executive creative director, RobertWong. The company sent a call out to 12 schoolssearching for interesting talent who would work insidethe Creative Lab for a year and then be sent out untothe industry. So, with the Google 5, the company getsnew creative blood and the industry gets young talentthat is schooled in Google, and, by extension, thepost-digital/new advertising way -- tech-forward,

open-source, collaborative, and smart.

Mr. Wong says the 5 initiative was motivated by two things: "getting fresh, awesome talent in theCreative Lab," and "fueling the ecosystem of the industry."

"It feels like every agency I talk to wants more digital expertise," said Mr. Wong. "The thinking wasthat, 'Hey we have great talent that can come in and play with all the tools here and then agencieswill get people that feel confident about all the tools at their disposal.' And of course it works for usbecause that way they know our tools and we can participate in the whole ecosystem."

Mr. Wong and the Lab team received around 400 applications for the five spots in the program. Theoriginal plan was to recruit a designer, an art director, a writer, a filmmaker and a programmer, butafter vetting the candidates in a process Mr. Wong likens to "casting a reality show," the teamselected two writers, Tristan Smith and J. Smith; two designers, Anthony Cafaro and JonathanJarvis; and a programmer, Michael Chang.

The team stood out for being talented and "multidextrous" and, in some cases, for their self-initiatedcreations: Mr. Jarvis wrote and directed an animated web film called "The Crisis of Credit

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Visualized" that explained the Wall Street meltdown in a simple, graphically compelling way andthat's been viewed over a million times online; Mr. Smith, while nominally a writer, impressed with aseries of 3-D photographs he created as a side project. But the whole team demonstrated the keycharacteristic of, er, "Googliness," which Mr. Wong describes as an amalgam of "ambition, humility,altruism, entrepreneurialism and sense of scale -- big thinkers who feel like they can really impact alot of people."

In June 2009, the 5 arrived at Google and were immersed immediately in every project that the Labhad cooking and in the aggressively open, collaborative Google working style.

"It wasn't like, 'OK, here's your little project and we'll work on the important things,'" said Mr. Jarvis."They were like, 'We need minds on this problem, you guys come and work on it.' So we wereworking on the same projects as the creative leads and working right alongside them; it was up tous to sink or swim, and to contribute as much as we could."

Within the group and in the larger Lab environment, "there's very little screen privacy," Mr. Cafarosaid. "There was always someone over your shoulder saying, 'Ooh, what if we tried this?'" Fresh outof school, the 5 noted that this kind of collaborative environment was a significant change from theirexperiences to date. "I think ad school trained you to be very competitive; there's this kind of killerinstinct they try and create in you," said Tristan Smith. "You're always pitching your work againstteams. I sort of had to reprogram myself here."

The 5 ended up working on a wide range of projects, from launching the Nexus phone --contributing to all facets of the product including packaging, pre-roll ads on Hulu and the boot-upanimation on the phone -- to the Google Christmas card ("everything here scales!" said TristanSmith).

And, of course, search.

How it all beganWhat eventually became "Parisian Love" and a Super Bowl hit started out as a key Google brief, to"remind people what they love about Google search," but also to showcase some engine particularsthey might not know about. "There were all these features that the engineers showed me that I thinkno one really knew about, like being able to type your flight number right into the search bar withoutgoing to an airline's site," said Mr. Wong. "So it was about showing people how they could search inother ways and how empowering that could be." Mr. Wong said several different ideas were floateduntil something caught -- the idea that it wasn't just one search and one answer, but a lifetime ofsearches. The 5 team ran with the idea of a search as representative of a moment in a life, inspiredby Mr. Wong's maxim that "the best results don't show up in a search engine, they show up in yourlife."

They worked to keep the idea pared down to keep the resulting spot "like theater of the mind," andpresented it to the search-marketing team. Mr. Wong said, "Everyone loved it and wanted to shareit." The spot appeared online in late 2009. It was an engineer who originally suggested putting thead on the Super Bowl. "For Google, it's a crazy idea," Mr. Wong said. "At the end of the day, thefounders loved the spot and they were excited by the idea of more people getting to see it. It was aone off, it was random. But it was surprising and that's what made it so cool."

The tenure of the original 5 came to an end this June, at which time the Lab ended up hiring TristanSmith. Messrs. Cafaro and Jarvis. J. Smith got a job at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland and Mr. Changis a free-agent programmer who recently created the much-discussed "Google Doodle" thataugured the September launch of Google Instant. He is currently working on projects for Barnes &Noble.

Up next: another group of "talented and nice" polymaths that includes Grant Gold, a designer out ofSchool of Visual Arts; Chris Trumbull and Natalie Hammel, writers from VCU; George MichaelBrower, a technologist from UCLA Design Media Arts; and Chris Lauritzen, a designer/"wild card"from Art Center College of Design's Media Design program.

Mr. Wong says the fresh 5 have been thrown into a range of projects covering search, Google TV,Chrome and other undisclosed ventures.

"The Lab is very flat and open," said Mr. Lauritzen, "which gives it a kind of chaos that can feel alittle overwhelming at times. It's also what makes it such a cool place to be, especially for someone

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learning how the creative industry works. There is a lot of amazing stuff going on, and it's allaccessible." Already, Mr. Brower has contributed to one of the creative highlights of the year,interactive video "The Wilderness Downtown," a collaboration between director Chris Milk andGoogle's Aaron Koblin, The Lab, B-Reel, Radical Media and designer/developer Mr. Doob.

The Arcade Fire coup and the Super Bowl spot are part of a growing body of work out of the Labcreated in collaboration with an array of partners, agency and otherwise. The Lab built on thesuccess of "Parisian Love" with more Search Stories, working with Pixar to create a "Toy Story3"-themed spot and launching a web tool allowing the public to create their own search story.

Quite a track recordMuch of the Lab's recent work has centered on the Chrome browser. In May, the group worked withBBH , New York, on "Speed Tests," which pitted the browser against the likes of sound waves anda potato-gun-fired potato in a series of real-time, in-camera demonstrations.

It's an admirable track record for a creative entity just 3 years old. Former Ogilvy co-President AndyBerndt was recruited in September 2007 to build the new unit; Mr. Wong, an ex-Arnold execcreative director and VP-creative at Starbucks, joined in 2008. But this is Google, after all, so whenMr. Wong tells you the ultimate goal for the Lab is to "win the Nobel Peace Prize," both of you cankeep a straight face.

The Lab is now a 50-person unit, working closely with Google marketing and with a growing rosterof agencies including BBH, Cutwater and Johannes Leonardo among others.

Mr. Wong offers a long and a short version of the Lab's mandate. "The Google Creative Lab is asmall team that strives to rethink marketing across every kind of media, currently existing or not --with Google as its sole client. Our mission is to 'remind the world what it is that they love aboutGoogle.' Our job is to manage and steward the brand, find new ways to communicate thecompany's innovations, intentions and ideals, and do work of which we can all be proud. We wantpeople ambitious and crazy enough to think we can actually change the world." The short version:"Do epic shit."

The part about reminding people why they love Google, though, can be considered one of today'smore interesting brand challenges: to take a company that was built on and whose name representsone thing -- search -- and craft a brand persona as the company expands in size and scope. Andoccasionally scares people. "It's human nature to root for the underdog," said Mr. Wong. "When youbecome successful, it's about, how do you exceed people's expectations?"

The Lab, said Mr. Wong, wants to take the processes and philosophies that made Google'sengineers successful -- intense focus on the consumer and user experience, flat operatingstructure, focus on prototyping and on an iterative process, scale and tech innovation -- and applythem to the marketing process. If Mr. Wong could push further, industry-wide, he said it would betoward "more listening, less talking; more feeling, less thinking, more doing, less promising, moreinventing, less polishing."

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COMMENTS

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0Reply

It's rare (maybe unheard of) to have a reality show-style of employee recruitmentthat actually works. Many companies use highly-paid corporate psychologists tosubmit potential employees to psychological profiling in order to �get the rightpeople on the bus." Still, hiring and firing remain at the same level as thecompanies without psychological profiling. Forget advertising. In terms ofemployee recruiting, Google may be on to something brilliant here ...http://actionad.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/how-to-write-a-tagline-that-sells/

0Reply

Great reporting, Teressa. Reading the description of how they created the spot thatran on the Super Bowl, it seems more certain that we can call them, "Google,traditional advertiser." Their "agency" structure is quite different, but the way theyarrive at the work is traditional. More on this: http://admajoremblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/in-defense-of-google-traditional.html

-3+20Reply

One woman out of 10 hires? I thought Google was more progressive than that.

-20Reply

I wasn't too impressed with the Parisian Dream commercial. It was a goodcommercial, but not something fantastic. However, what Google Chrome did withArcade Fire...THAT was incredible.

-1+20Reply

I've met and worked with the Google 5 while consulting for the Creative Lab - ifadvertising has a future, it'll be written by guys like them. Ernest Lupinacci CCOErnest Industries


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