Embracing Chaos

I went to watch the latest Harry Potter movie last night with some friends.  One of the previews was for a new Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum.  Typical lots of cars getting smashed and then at the end, on the text page, a URL:

From across the theater I heard a "Woah!" I think from Brady.  Why?  Because even without touching a web browser, this constitutes an apparent change in policy for Google.  Advertisers with enough money can now buy marketing URLs on the highly trusted and respected google.com domain.  In other words, they’ve sold out.  People intrinsically trust Google and will do lots of things that Google sponsors that they wouldn’t do for say AOL, Microsoft or (ahem) Real Networks.  Ironically, the reason people trust Google is because Google has never done these kinds of co-marketing deals.  They have previously only done things with clear customer benefit. 

Google is stepping down a dangerous path.  It’s not exactly evil.  But it’s putting more attention on getting revenue than on delighting the customer.  If Google keeps doing this, customers won’t trust the Google brand because they won’t know when Google is doing something to help organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, and when Google is doing something to make money off you the trusting customer.  Thinking these two activities are both "good" (as opposed to evil) is a dangerous cultural shift.  Brand equity is like an old-growth forest.  You can cut it down and make lots of money.  But it will not regrow quickly nor easily. Real Networks did this after the bubble burst.  They were able to survive some pretty tough times using shady business practices like superpass which turned consumer trust into cold hard pennies.  But they will probably never be a respected brand again, largely because they cannot shake the addiction to business practices with the value proposition of pick-pocketing.  Has missing their numbers sent Google down a similar path?    (A couple weeks ago there was an interesting, somewhat related discussion on Radar.)

I have to say a few words about the experience of visiting that URL.  It immediately redirects you to another URL, www.searchforbourne.com, reinforcing the idea that all Google is doing is selling a trusted domain to hang a marketing URL on.  The launch page insists that you install Flash 9, and the upgrade experience from whatever version I had was not smooth.  (More echoes of Real Networks.)  Once inside, it asks you to sign in to your Google account to play some game it seems.  At this point I’m thinking that maybe there is some real integration here.  But no.  The next page explains it all:

"Google must provide Universal Pictures with the primary email address associated with your Google account for verification purposes."

Verification purposes?  I signed in with my Google account password — that’s verification.  This is something else, and that wording is deceptive IMHO.  Google just sold my gmail address to Universal Pictures!  Wow.  This is worse than I thought.  I wonder if Google will put an exception in its spam-filtering rules for Universal.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 9:24 AM and is filed under Business, Tech Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.