Lee defined an important question - what is marketing innovation? Marketing innovation is thinking of ideas we can bring to our users that also support us. With Google being such a massive company, they have a relative level of conservatism they have to maintain. To assist them in this, they have an excellent attitude towards problem solving that is encouraged from the most senior of employees to their newest recruits.
YouTube and Google means different things to different people. Lee set himself a challenge to come up with a big idea and try get it off the ground in a few months from when he started at Google. He was working around adwords at the time and thought - what if you get students to upskill themselves? What if you gave student teams a couple of hundred dollars in an adwords voucher and they create a campaign for a client that/s never been on Google before? He set this idea to my superiors, they said yes and it turned into the Google Online Marketing Challenge.
Google has the attitude of "don't do it small, if you're going to do it go global as soon as you can". He spoke with professors all over the world and happily and its now gone out to about 80,000 students. All from an idea 3 months in because of the culture of innovation they have there. Google CEO and founder Larry Page was quoted in saying "If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you are doing the wrong things." For Lee, he said its very helpful if he is being overly ambitious that he can show his employers this quote when attempting something extremely ambitious and they'll say, ok off you go.
Lee focused on 4 key areas during his speech: looking for inspiration anywhere; focusing on one real user; making it matter; and not being afraid to fail but if you do, fail fast.
Look for inspiration everywhere:
Lee discussed a very successful project created by YouTube and Google a few years ago called "Life in A Day, an idea brought to him by Tim Partridge using user generated content to produce a true reflection of life in the day on YouTube. They asked users to upload a snapshot of their day which would then be turned into a full length feature film directed by Ridley Scott. They ended up getting 5000 hours of footage to use which they then had to edit down into a 90 minute film that ended up premiering at Sundance online to millions of viewers.
An important comment Lee made was "letting others speak for you says more about us". Lee worked on a project inspired by John Butterill, a nature photographer who shared a video of him showing a bedridden woman his view as a photographer. The video inspired other photographers to do the same. and very quickly the idea took off, all without any involvement from Google. Lee said "if you tried to do that yourself, it wouldn't work. We let the story tell itself."
Focus on one real user:
Because you're dealing with a scale of billions and 100s of millions of people, you have to try to figure out the art vs science. Lee mentioned how Google try to figure out the right story to tell. The way they think about it is through the users' and magic (what the product can do and how it affects their users' lives). They want to personalise these products. Search is a hard product to market - everyone uses Google search but how do you get to those human stories. A simple advert they created for search was through a video which showed the searches one man makes during a small period in his life from going on a gap year to Paris, to meeting his girlfriend, to marrying her, to having their first child. It was an emotive product that only used content found through Google Search online.
Make It Matter:
A lot of markeitng you do wants to have a point. Lee said that at Google, they are at their most innovative when they have a big responsibility to come up with creative solutions to problems, using technology for good. GoogleX is where they push the boat out as far as possible - soon to be created breakthroughs - where they come up with a totally radical solution for difficult problem. Examples include:
- The self-driving car
- Project Loon - getting the internet to people who don't currently have it, flying balloons up to space which creates a network for people who have no other way of getting to a network
- Project Wing - tries to tackle the problem of delivery in places where the infrastructure isn't really there.
Don't be afraid to fail, if you do fail fast:
Its all about iteration. Seeing how people react to it, seeing if we can attract more talent. Failure is only a true failure if it takes too long and you don't learn anything from it. You need to recognise, and declare your failure, figure out your mistakes and move on.
Google Glasses - people say this was released too early. Our attitude is we have learnt a lot from it. We don't think there was no set model for how you introduce this to the world. Bringing it out to the public was just another step in that iteration process. We failed but we believe we failed and learnt a lot.
The Culture of Innovation in Australia:
Lee commented that we have really favourable conditions for entrepreneurship in this country but we have a significant feeling of fear of failure. There is a lot of great talent within Australia. As people, we are behind this idea of freedom and openness. We love technology - we are early adopters. We are behind tech entrepreneurship. There are 1500 startups across the country. But, we have a problem with tall poppies. Relatively speaking to other countries, we don't celebrate entrepreneurs. We really don't have a high tolerance for failure and we don't demand enough choice - we're very happy to accept low amount of competition. We don't support those who can't compete.
What do we do?
Having the right culture is fundamental to innovation. The Google ideal is really powerful and can be demonstrated through a number of their projects. Its important to build culture of openness and contribution. Building communities that can participate in technological innvoation. We need to celebrate entrepreneurship and failure or at least don't have a go at those that do fail. To cap it off, Lee summarised this perfectly in saying "getting together like we are at the emergence festival is a great start."
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