Los Angeles — Search engine titan Google Inc., normally famous for creating its global business empire using little or no any conventional marketing method to promote its wares, has nonetheless found that such an approach is effective for its enterprise products and, has launched its biggest ever international advertising campaign running across six countries using the tag-line “Gone Google” designed to win over users of Microsoft products.
Google said more than 2 million businesses now employ its online office software, and the Web search leader is going global with an advertising campaign to entice customers away from Microsoft Corp and IBM products.
The “Gone Google” campaign is targeted at IT and business executives who influence IT purchasing decisions, and is configured to sell them on the benefits of using products like Google Apps and the Search Appliance enterprise search device.
The campaign, which begins Monday, which is also being extended in the U.S., will involve billboards and signs in airports and train stations, as well as ads in major online and print publications in the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore, represents a rare penetration by Google into mass-market advertising and underscores increasing competition to provide businesses with email and other office software.
How one of Google’s adverts could look in Liverpool Street station.
The campaign emphasizes mainly on Google Apps, the company’s Web-based suite of collaboration and communication applications, whose “cloud” software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture Google maintains is a superior alternative to managing on-premises software.
The campaign is being operated by Google Enterprise — the division which support products for business use, Google applications such as Google Mail, Google Docs, Calendar, Google Maps and Google Earth as well as digital security services — and marks a push by the online giant to take a share of Microsoft’s office services market.
The campaign’s tag-line “Gone Google” denotes to the 1.7m businesses that the company claims have already embraced its services.
“It is the first and very highly visible integrated ad campaign that we have launched,” said Dave Armstrong, head of marketing for Google Enterprise for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Gone Google is a concept that we are at a tipping point where you [businesses] need to move to a new model. Look at how Google has brought products to the enterprise market, we have done it differently than some of the other competitors.”
The ads use straplines that is designed to convince readers of the superiority of Google’s products, such as “Day 9: Email inbox is full. Grrr!!! Go Google?”, and “Day 15: Attaching documents is so 1990s. Go Google?”.
“The idea behind [Going Google] is that companies change to Google Apps and it is a real transformational change,” said Tom Oliveri, Google’s enterprise marketing director.
Nikesh Arora, Google’s top sales executive, added, “We are also seeing lots of traction among small and medium-sized businesses, which continue to increase at a fast pace.”
While Microsoft and International Business Machines Corp command the market for enterprise email, Google is attempting to convince businesses to switch to its so-called cloud-based services, in which software is accessed over the Internet and maintained at Google’s data centers instead of on a company’s computers.
Gartner analyst Tom Austin said most businesses will eventually switch to cloud-based email, but the process may take years. He noted IBM and Microsoft have introduced cloud products recently, and that Cisco Systems Inc appears to be preparing to offer its own cloud-based software.
On Thursday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told investors during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call he intended to boost investments in new business initiatives.
The campaign consists of 21 different ads that will run over 28 days. The initial campaign included billboards in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco. The new one will expand to Britain, France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore, with ads showing up in high-traffic transit stations and in airports.
The UK campaign will run across media such as outdoor billboards, digital locations in train stations including Paddington and Liverpool Street, and print ads in titles such as the Economist and Daily Telegraph. An online campaign will run across websites including Silicon.com, FT.com and Times Online.
Armstrong said the campaign aimed to play on the “frustrations that users and IT teams face everyday”.
A spokesman for Google UK said the company had never before run such a high profile campaign, just the odd small ad push in targeted trade magazine titles and websites.
Google’s Apps business — which the company has said is profitable and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year — is a tiny portion of Google’s overall business, which yielded almost $22 billion revenue last year.
According to spokesman Andrew Kovacs, its Apps team has doubled over the past year to more than 1,000 employees.
Watch the video offering a preview of the ad campaign here.