The Silicon Valley mystique was built on that foundation; bright people, many of them locals from Stanford and Berkeley (though leavened with lots of Harvard drop-outs), could out-innovate and out-invest corporate drones who came up through a culture lubricated by golf games and liquor.
Now Google and, to a lesser extent Facebook, have picked up the torch. Google was founded by a couple of Stanford grad students and quickly promoted its reputation for hiring only the brightest. Their devilishly difficult pre-hire interviews became (in)famous. Facebook's Harvard roots were celebrated in the movie 'Social Network,' with the foundation myth even including hoary high school geek versus jock triumphalism.
Google has now gone two steps further. For decades the Westinghouse Science Fair was the World Cup of US teenage quant/tech achievement. When Westinghouse collapsed into the trash bin of industrial failure, Google snatched up the mantle, establishing its brand as the IQ equivalent. More recently, it has established a new publication, to be called 'Think Quarterly' further extending the brilliance brand. It must be said that Microsoft tried this with 'Slate,' a magazine generally considered an estimable but ultimately disappointing experiment. Google is undeterred.
Why the land rush to intelligence domination? Pretty simple actually. When you are selling very expensive machines (now more politely known as systems) to replace peoples' jobs and, in effect, their minds, you had better be able to demonstrate those customers are buying smarter. 'Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM;' remember that one? Secondly, in a highly competitive post-industrial global economy, you need every edge you can get. Brains beats brawn. JL
Natasha Singer reports in the New York Times:
“DATA beats opinion” has long been a mantra at Google, where evidence-based research tends to rule. But now the company is showing its softer side with Think Quarterly, a business-to-business publication whose first United States issue is to make its debut online this week.
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.
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