Although the Web site will be accessible to the public, the e-zine is designed as a business marketing vehicle, promoting Google’s insights and analyses of consumer behavior to clients like digital advertisers and publishers. The company worked with Fantasy Interactive, a digital design agency in Manhattan, to make the publication look sleek on iPads and smartphones.
But Google is turning to a retro technique — snail mail — to try to create buzz for the online project, printing a limited edition of Think Quarterly as a hardcover book. This week, a small group of marketing executives and agencies are set to receive it. How many? Google declined to say.
But we can tell you that the book comes packaged like a billet-doux: fastened with a blue ribbon and secured with an old-fashioned-looking embossed seal. In other words, the fast-information company is inviting its clients to a data slow dance.
“Since we are such believers in the power of digital information,” says Lisa Gevelber, head of global ads marketing at Google, “you especially would not expect us to produce a book.” The hard-copy format is intended to be disruptive, she says, with surprise tactile elements. The front cover can be used as a magnetic word-board, for example, and the heat-sensitive end papers react like mood rings.
The company has conducted in-house research for years, often packaging it for the public in products like Google Trends or Google Insights for Search . But at a time when data is proliferating faster than ever, Google is playing devil’s advocate with the new publication, a leisurely read that noodles over the business implications and applications of innovation and information.
Think Quarterly includes articles by Google executives, profiles of managers at other companies, bright illustrations, data visualizations and large-font quotations that look like Google search results. Like the Slow Food movement, which advocates savoring locally grown produce, it could be seen as an argument for Slow Data. After all, ruminating over selective data seems a logical antidote to wholesale data collection.
The publication aims to highlight information that is “the most salient to how the world is changing,” Ms. Gevelber says, and to identify trends that marketers might harness. Dataphiles may find the site interesting as well.
There’s an article by Amit Singhal, the engineer responsible for developing Google’s search engine, envisioning more accurate and more personalized search technology. There’s a top 10 list of novel ideas — for example, the Gross National Happiness Index developed by Bhutan — selected by Hannah Jones, a Nike executive.
There’s also an article by Dennis Woodside, Google’s president of American sales, on the next big marketing trends. By 2015, he predicts, payment via smartphones will rival credit card use, and niche online content produced by specialists will likely nudge out more general content.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Mr. Woodside’s article underscores the importance of experts. Marketing Google as the pre-eminent data curator seems to be Think Quarterly’s raison d’être. It’s Wired magazine re-imagined for digital marketing executives.
Just don’t call it content creation — a move that would have Google competing with the publishers that are its customers.
“It’s not in any way intended to be a publishing endeavor,” Ms. Gevelber avers.
Sure thing.
Whatever you want to call it, the publication represents the latest entry in a long line of high-profile business-to-business marketing and media projects. Dell’s Web site, “The Power to Do More,” promotes Dell products like electronic medical records. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has “Knowledge at Wharton,” a site that publicizes faculty research.
BUT Think Quarterly is unusual because, in addition to promoting Google’s own people and products, it seems designed to spur private conversations between Google and its most forward-thinking clients, says Gary Lilien, a research professor of management science at Pennsylvania State University who studies business-to-business marketing. “I think it’s a mechanism for Google to build a community with their advertisers and content providers,” Professor Lilien says. The Web site may be freely accessible to the public, he adds, but “they are not trying to broadcast this — it’s more of a closed club.”
The publication is part of a Google effort, started last year, to package the company’s data analyses and trend forecasts for its clients as the “Think” brand. There are conferences called think events, for major advertisers and business partners, and a Web site called “think insights” for marketers who are interested in research on consumer impressions. Earlier this year, the company published a British-centric online edition of Think Quarterly and delivered it in book format to executives in Britain.
The effort to sort, select and summarize data for others is not new. It’s an ancient, pragmatic response to feeling beleaguered by information, says Ann Blair, a history professor at Harvard and the author of “Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age.” In earlier ages, however, the sense of being inundated with information was felt mainly by scholars. After the printing press was invented, Professor Blair says, they felt even more overwhelmed by the sheer number of books available.
Now the public is facing a digital data tsunami. “What strikes me as unique about our age isn’t so much that, as individuals, we feel overloaded and panicked about all the information we should know,” she says, “but the fact that everyone, whatever your walk of life, everyone now experiences overload.”
Google may be positioning itself as the curator for digital marketers. The rest of us, however, may have to fend for ourselves.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0415ed30404aacb245d86fd42cabfc81
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