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							                                Matt Brittin                                    1


Podcast Transcript – Matt Brittin
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IV   In less than ten years, Google has grown from a start-up company
     into a listed business earning more than $10bn of revenue a year. It’s
     done this by transforming the world of online search – delivering
     highly-relevant results and highly-targeted advertising opportunities.
     In January 2007, Matt Brittin left his role as director of strategy and
     digital at leading newspaper group Trinity Mirror to become Country
     Director for Google UK, where his work gives him deep insight into
     the needs of Google’s largest clients. What is it about the Google
     model that makes it so effective for users and advertisers alike?

MB   Our whole core business model is built on, you know, search marketing,
     and the ability for an advertiser to reach a very, very large audience, in a
     highly-targeted way. To advertise against particular terms that you type
     into Google, and show up their ads, but only pay when you, as the user,
     click on that ad and go through to a relevant webpage. So, if you're
     searching for mother's day flowers, and you see an ad from somebody who
     provides mother's day flowers, you click on that ad and go straight through
     to the mother's day flowers part of their website, and you're able to
     transact.

     That's a great experience for a user, and a great experience from the
     advertiser's perspective, because they're only paying for hot leads, people
     who actually want to buy mother's day flowers. A traditional media version
     of that would be, "where do I think people who might buy mother's day
     flowers might be consuming media? Let me place an ad in a newspaper or
     a magazine or whatever, in order to try and capture some proportion of
     those. I don't know whether that ad's going to actually generate sales or
     not, but, I know that other people in this market are also advertising,
     therefore I'd better not lose my share of voice” Which is a really crude
     approach by comparison with the kind of thing that's now possible through
     search marketing. So, really good, sort of, targeting, down to individual
     people, but with a really broad reach across everybody who's searching
     Google, that's a phenomenal new proposition, and advertisers are really
     starting to see the benefit of that in driving improved returns on their
     advertising investment and building their business, both on and offline.

IV   As a nation, the UK has seen one of the most rapid uptakes of
     broadband in the world. Over 70% of the online population access
     the internet via broadband, leading to an ever-greater number of
     people spending longer and longer online, and using the web as a
     primary means to research – and make – their purchases. How does
     this affect the marketing strategies of the clients Matt works with?

MB   Well, I think the most obvious connection is between the kind of trend of
     access and speed, and how that plays out for the consumer, the consumer
     experience. Because, if you think of anybody that is now operating an e-
     commerce facility – a good example would be like a traditional retailer, who
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     probably, some years back, decided, "actually, of course, we've got to have
     an online shop," and they started to get serious about that, they probably
     had it in a separate organisational unit, reporting into the trading director or
     the CEO or somebody, or maybe even in marketing, to get it going and get
     it to scale. And, in many cases, that is now the biggest store and, in many
     cases, what they're now, kind of, looking at doing, is trying to think about
     how do they integrate that further with their traditional business. Because,
     actually, you know, they haven't got a group of consumers who are
     shopping online and a group of consumers who are shopping offline, what
     they’ve got is all of us who are often researching online and purchasing
     offline, sometimes researching in the store and purchasing online,
     sometimes researching online and purchasing online.

     So, we're all operating in one world, and, you know, the retail organisations
     probably haven't joined up the people who do the online marketing and
     sales activity with people who run their stores, in perhaps the way they now
     realise they need to. I think there's real sort of organisation challenges.
     And retail's a good example because, you know, they're quite obviously
     complex. You know, what catalogue do you want to offer if you're in, say,
     fashion retail, online, do you want to offer more or less range than you offer
     in the stores? What about the price points? Should they be the same or
     different from in store? What about how many times a year you update
     your range? Should it be continuous, when new things become available,
     or should you hold back and make a couple of seasonal collections a year.
     So, all of those kind of challenges and questions start to surface when you
     have an online business that's so clearly linked to the traditional business
     you operate in, and when your consumers are shopping across both, which
     is now starting to happen as broadband becomes a mass market tool.

IV   Google has surrounded its core search product with a range of other
     offerings, including innovative and entertaining programmes, such as
     Google Earth, and highly-practical tools, such as Google Maps. In
     2006, Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $1.65bn made it a leading
     player in the social media phenomenon. Are these moves designed
     to make Google more ‘sticky’ – in other words, a must-visit
     destination in its own right?

MB   Well, interestingly, if you think about it, Google's one of the few websites in
     the world that actually tries to get you to leave as quickly as possible.
     We're really focused on very, very rapid results, we tell you how long it
     takes to serve the results, if you look, and very relevant results, that allow
     you to find what you want. And so, I guess, our approach to stickiness, if
     you want to call it 'stickiness,' it's not about getting people to spend lots of
     time on the core site, but actually getting people to feel that this is a great
     tool and, you know, coming back to us, to use it, to find more and different
     things. And because, you know, people can select a search engine very
     easily, you know, the next search engine is only a click away, and, actually,
     if you want to find a range of search engines, you can search in Google to
     find where other search engines are. So, you know, we try to make it easy
     for people to compare and contrast those kind of alternatives, and hope
     that the combination of speed, relevance and responsiveness that we can
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     deliver is going to make them want to come back to Google, time and time
     again.

IV   So far, the hope appears to be fulfilled. Google is the world’s premier
     search engine, particularly in Europe, where it’s a long way ahead of
     its nearest competitor. Where does Matt think that a threat to this
     pre-eminence might come from – if at all?

MB   I think if you asked the founders of Google, you know, what competition
     they're most concerned about, they would probably say two guys in a
     garage. In fact, I've heard them say that answer. And I think it's a smart
     answer, because this is a world in which innovation comes out of nowhere,
     a world in which the established way is often overturned by a new
     innovation that comes from a completely different perspective, cost base
     and economic model.

     So, I think two guys in a garage is what keeps our leadership team awake,
     and keeps them feeling the need to innovate and keep developing the
     product and services. The thing about our model, as I said, it is a model
     where consumers can easily choose an alternative search engine, and so
     we have to work hard all the time to keep up with consumer behaviour and
     to develop and innovate even better, faster and more relevant results.

IV   Is keeping up with consumer behaviour – and responding with
     innovation – what lies at the heart of a successful search product?

MB   I think so. And I think the sorts of things that we believe are, that if you
     focus on the user, everything else can follow, so, really thinking about
     putting the user first, thinking about your experience, my experience, you
     know, my mother's experience, my children's experience, of the online
     environment, and trying to find ways of making it better, faster, richer, more
     relevant, easier, more useful. So, I think that that's a core part of our
     strategy. We believe that, sort of, fast is better than slow, so we try to do
     things fairly rapidly. We see behaviour changing fast and we see
     technology and computer science changing fast and, therefore, we want to
     be experimenting with things all the time, and we want to learn from those
     experiments and adapt and build the lessons into refinements of our
     products and services, which is why you'll see us, typically, launch things
     and evolve them over time, rather than wait to get it absolutely right and
     launch it, because, just by the nature of the environment we're in, it will
     need updating soon, anyway. So, putting the user first and trying to do
     things fast, make a lot of sense to us.

IV   There are many advertising formats to choose from online, ranging
     from paid-for search results through to pop-up ads, banners and,
     increasingly, video. How does Matt rate the effectiveness of the
     different formats? And how should an advertiser’s use of online tools
     dovetail with their marketing strategies in the non-virtual world?

MB   I think, you know, the main three areas of, kind of, online marketing spend,
     is currently categorised search, display and classified. And I think, you
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     know, all are effective in their own different way and in different
     combinations. And I think, you know, actually, what we need to be thinking
     about is, if you're a business, how do I reach the people who are interested
     in the kind of products and services I can sell them, and engage them and
     transact with them and make them into loyal customers. And if you think
     about that question, making a distinction between on and offline media is a
     bit of a mistake, in my view, now, because online media is such a bit part of
     where people spend their media time, and it's got a range of tools and
     utility to it that some of the traditional media don't have. So, I think, number
     one, it's about understanding all of the different media and how they might
     work together, which is a hard thing to do, because online is quite young,
     and the impact of online on how people spend time in other media is, as
     yet, hard to understand, although it's clearly happening, you just think
     about the number of times you now spend surfing your laptop in front of the
     TV.

     So, I guess that's my first point. Within online, you know, what I think is,
     kind of, strong, and all of the existing, you know, display, video, targeted
     advertising, as I mentioned, targeted advertising on publisher's websites
     and classified advertising, I think, are very vibrant markets, continue to
     grow very strongly, relative to other types of media. I think what would
     underpin success in the medium term for online media is targeting and
     relevance. So, I don't think this is a world, any longer, where shouting
     louder helps win you customers. I think it's a world in which being targeted,
     being relevant and being engaging, lead to success. And so, I think, you
     know, if you think about your early experiences on the Internet, horrible
     shouty, flashy, banner ads, and pop-ups and so on, which were really
     interfering with you.

     Now, if you think about the online experience, much more about highly
     targeted and relevant advertising being served up to you, and you engage
     with it or click on it or whatever, when it suits you, because it's useful
     information. And I think that's very much the line with our kind of
     philosophy at Google, which is let's try to make information relevant and
     useful, and advertising can be relevant and useful too, it doesn't
     necessarily need to be an interruption media.

IV   The need for advertisers to stop interrupting and start engaging is
     increasingly recognised across the world of search marketing. How
     does Google intend to help its clients move in the right direction?

MB   We've got a new form of advertising that we're experimenting in at the
     moment called gadget ads, which are effectively a website within a
     website, like a little module, which can have the functionality of a website,
     but be shown up as an ad format. So, for example, if you're thinking about
     holidaying abroad and you're looking at a travel review website, there might
     be an ad that turns up that allows you to type in the destination you're
     looking at and the date windows you're looking at and all the return kind of
     flight availability, without you having to leave that website. So, I think that's
     a great example of being able to ask an advertiser questions. The
     advertising is both relevant, because if it's in the right place at the right
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     time, and it's engaging, because it allows you to interact with it in a way
     that gives you value, in this case, not entertainment but the actual utility of
     having an answer to, "can I fly there? How much does it cost? And have
     you got any seats left?"

IV   As you’d expect, gadget ads are not the only way in which Google is
     experimenting with new search tools. One of the most important
     developments in the pipeline is a drive to enrich search results by
     making them far more than simply a list of website links.

MB   We're investing a lot of effort in something called Universal Search, which
     we've launched in the US and you're starting to see elements of it showing
     up in the UK and Europe. What that is, at the moment, you think about
     search, you're really searching web pages. What we're trying to do is
     combine findings from web pages, from image, from video, from books,
     from local business listings, in one search. Now, that sounds, you know,
     particularly unexciting potentially, but that's actually a major change in our
     infrastructure. So, every time you type something, we have to go through
     all of those different databases, look for relevant results in each database,
     and then work out how to combine them, in what order, to give you
     something that's going to be useful to you. So, if you search for Coldplay,
     you know, it might be of value to you to see a photograph of the band, a
     link to a video, their recent album, some song lyrics, and links to stores
     stocking their CDs or their downloads.

     So, when you think about, well, what combination of those different results
     might be useful to you, I think that will add real value to the user, because
     instead of going to – you know, most of those things exist separately in
     Google and in the UK at the moment, but instead of going to separate
     search engines, actually try to return to you the most relevant results from
     each of them, where we think, you know, that that particular medium will
     offer something of value to you. So, that's one big set of changes that we
     are rolling out now.