I was excited when my colleague told me we were going to see Patrick Keane, Director of Sales Strategy at Google, speak to the Harvard Business School Club. As Precision Prospects provides qualified online leads to financial and business technology companies, I was interested to hear what Google was doing in this area. I quickly googled “Google + cost per acquisition” and was delighted to see the results. There were 1,070,000 results!!! And the first headline proclaimed, “Google announces CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) campaigns.” Wow, I thought, this is great. This could be a great opportunity to talk to Google about ventures, etc.
I couldn’t wait to get to the event. First of all, let me say that the Google offices are very cool. Exercise Balls in primary colors are everywhere (in comparison to Yahoo’s Yoga blocks). A Rollercoaster Bead Maze greets you at the reception desk. And the food and the wine at the reception was amazing. My senses were on overload and I was ready to talk to someone. Alas!! There was no one in the crowd wearing Google name tags. I walked around searching and finally meet someone from Google. Great guy but it turns out he heads event planning. I compliment him on the food and continue to look for someone to talk marketing or biz dev. They were either not there or traveling in disguise.
Undaunted, we sat down for the presentation with the audacious title of “What Google Knows About The Future of Marketing”. Perhaps an advertising medium can also be a psychic medium… The presentation was filled with anecdotes promoting Google Trends – kinda fun to see that OJ Simpson trumped Jessica Simpson and The Simpsons in Google searches after that book debacle. But what was missing was insight on where marketing is going, how Google can help marketers improve their returns and most important – counsel on what to consider as performance advertising evolves. Yes, Google will own everything and all advertising will be driven there – but please tell us how all the cool tools will bring our clients accountability and build their businesses.
