Google Looking at Crispin Porter to Take Over Public Relations?
After it was announced that Cindy McCaffrey, Google’s vice president of corporate marketing, was leaving Google, there had been a bit of stir in their next steps for marketing plans. Google has been a news industry darling over the past 2 years, putting the cherry on top of the vanilla float with their half hour featurette on CBS’s 60 Minutes last Sunday.
McCaffrey has been a big name in PR for 20 years with positions at Apple Computer, E*TRADE and the 3DO Company. At Google, she was top of her game with a company that would rather put time into long lasting publicity than 15 second TV commercials (the 60 Minutes piece and Playboy interview probably had more folks Googling than any Superbowl Ad ever would).
Silicon Beat adds “McCaffrey shaped Google’s low-key marketing approach, rejecting a high-profile campaign in the company’s early years in favor of word-of-mouth marketing, colleague Matt Marshall says. “Remember, (then interim marketing V.P.) Scott Epstein brought in some high-powered advertising experts and proposed a massive advertising campaign in late 1999. McCaffrey, siding with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rejected that approach, saying they’d rather spend their money on developing the best product, which would be the best way of generating publicity. That was a significant step for two reasons. First, because everyone else around them at the time was spending millions on ads. Second, because other search engines (think Excite, et al) had successfully pursued such ad strategies to get a leap ahead of the competition.”
Just imagine being able to list that you helped create the brand name of Google into an everyday English verb!
According to the Online Marketing Blog Crispin Porter may be in line now to take over the public relations for Google.
The word is that Google has been looking for an agency and Crispin Porter Bogusky might have some advantage. Crispin assisted Google with the creating several recruiting billboards. From New York Post Online Edition
I was able to see a presentation from one of the founders at Crispin on creative advertising last summer in Minneapolis and it was amazing how creative these folks are. They’ve done some fantastic work offline (Mini Cooper) and online (BK Subservient Chicken).
