After breezing through the radical transformations that many industries are undergoing thanks to information technologies, Phillips immediately drove home Google’s role in the confusion that has ensued from so much content: follow the consumer. Aside from sorting the world’s online information, Google is doing this through relevance marketing.

The world’s most recognized brand is constantly reinvesting in itself, said Phillips. Google’s home page may appear the same as it did a few years ago, but he reassured the crowd that the search engine’s many engineers are constantly working behind the scenes to make the user experience more effective and enjoyable. Google’s talented teams are one of the primary reasons why the Internet world is changing so much. Reasoned Phillips, if you do not lead change, you become change.

As the media and advertising worlds change dramatically for everyday people, Phillips said that consumers need and desire more control over content and products that they seek online. Control is the principal motivation behind relevance marketing, circled by related facets of choice, customization, connection and convenience: what Google is trying to do is “take an overwhelming set of choices and bring it to a manageable level through customization. Then create a user interface to make the information more convenient and provide connectivity that will allow them to make their lives more convenient.”     

When Phillips was hired, Google was looking to branch out into other types of marketing than online. He had had some experience in the magazine industry, but ultimately decided that the newspaper industry was the one that fit Google’s aims most. Since then, Phillips has helped “create a rich environment for consumers, publishers and advertisers to come together – (Google) only succeed(s) when (newspapers) succeed.”

The point of Google Print Ads is to make newspaper advertising, which usually requires complicated processes and ratings, “more accessible, better targeted and easier to play, purchase and place.” At the same time that the company has been trying to make print advertising more efficient, Google has been introducing new advertisers to publishers. Many of these are purely online companies. Phillips cited several success stories in which online businesses which advertised in newspapers saw their traffic or sales jump 30% after running a print advertisement.

Google has been testing print ads with about 30 papers in the US. Phillips beamed that the trials had been so successful that the project is ready to officially launch in a month.

As Google often does, Phillips also took the chance to ease publishers’ worries, promising them that Google is not in the content producing business. Instead, it wants to partner with newspapers, believing that the future of the digital newspaper is very similar to how print works today, not the completely different online offerings that many media pundits envision. Phillips thinks that Google can help newspapers with this evolution, making the news experience an improved and more efficient one for consumers, advertisers and publishers.   

Source: INMA World Congress