Google Zeitgeist Europe 2007: Frenemies become friends of me

[this was originally published on www.totalcontentandmedia.com]

The days preceding a long weekend, especially in an early summer period, can be slow for news. This conversely makes it a good week for pow-wows among the titans of the media industry.

Monday kicked off with Google Zeitgeist Europe outside of London, a get-together for high-level executives—heads of industry, media giants, and leading technologists—to speak about Google and the latest in how technology and information will impact our lives. Of course, if the event's host has its way, those two topics will become even less mutually exclusive as time goes on.

Journalist attendance, according Google's European PR, was restricted to a "handful of general columnists" (meaning I was not invited). This also meant there wouldn't be lots of press coverage.

So, I decided to use Google Zeitgeist as to test of the search giant's usefulness in information gathering today.

The advances of social media and online video are such that many of the event's speeches were posted around the Internet. But there was a lot less 'chatter' about the event than I thought I would find. Perhaps this is a testament to attendees' loyalty to the big G.

Most of the speeches were quite high level—eg, the CEO of Orange, Sanjiv Ahuja, spoke about the need to extend communication to all parts of the developing world. He also pointed out that Orange's year-on-year revenue growth in Africa is 'north of 30%' and its margins in the region are some of the highest. "As human beings, we should be doing business everywhere," he concluded.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of Easy Jet and its affiliated companies, talked about climate change, chiding his executive audience for using private jets to get to events like Google Zeitgeist.

Among the info-bytes I came across, Google makes 40% of its advertising revenue outside of the US, with 19% in the UK alone. This is interesting information because in the past the company's not broken out these figures. (I found this on a Twitter entry from Loïc LeMeur, a social media entrepreneur and obsessive-compulsive user of its many tools.)

I also found an interview between Google's chief Eric Schmidt and the editor of the Economist, John Micklethwait. This had originally been posted on YouTube by Google, but curiously the first result for it in Google's weblog search was on what appears to be a Ninja-fan blog called Mung Ning Ryu. I'll leave it to you to make the connection between Ninjas and Google.

(Google incidentally has posted a number of other videos from the event on YouTube, many of which focus on topics like the environment.)

Schmidt uses public appearances to articulate what Google's ambitions are as a business. But he also spends quite a lot of time acting frankly surprised at the company's impact.

"We're beginning to see significant issues about our role in the world," he said during his interview at the Zeitgeist event. "We're trying to be more transparent and clear [about] how information is being used and what is available. "

Acting wide-eyed is not a bad way of deflecting negative attention Google might get as a result of its newfound power. But this doesn't work all the time:

Dylan Thwaites, CEO of search marketing company Latitude, he writes in his blog: "The audience got the chance to ask [one panel of advertising executives] questions – ostensibly about the panel topic “branding”. Zero interest in branding - two of the three questions were on the theme 'Is Google the enemy?' [Martin] Sorrell [WPP's CEO] says he invented the word 'Frenemy' to describe his $200m relationship with Google. Nikesh Arora, CEO EMEA for Google, pretended to mistake this for 'Friend of Me', so Sorrell now uses Froe (Friend /Foe). All very light hearted, but at the root of this there is an earthquake of change."

More specifics on change were not spelled out by attendees, but there has definitely been a shift in how Google thinks about itself. Back in his Economist-editor interview, Schmidt said: "One of the key messages [to Google employees] in the last month or two is that we want people to be focussed around the core business of Google, which is textual advertising." Note that he did not say "search," which used to be what Google would say their core business was.

What about the future? Danny Rimer, general partner at VC firm Index Ventures, served as the moderator for a group of European entrepreneur panellists who spoke on the second day of the conference. Speaking with Nathalie Massenet, the founder of online retailer net-a-porter.com (a video I also found on Loïc LeMeur's blog), he made a distinction between exploration and fulfilment online: some sites are good at one, some are good at the other, but it's very hard to be good at both. He seemed to think that net-a-porter.com was succeeding, though.