The honeymoon season at Google, a company that took pride in its culture of innovation and allowed developers the luxury to work on their own ideas for 20% of the time, may finally be coming to an end. Google has recently named a strategic planning director – Stuart Smith – for Google’s Creative Lab in New York. Smith was previously a planning director at Wieden and Kennedy, an ad agency that worked on brands like Nike and Honda.
So what does Smith has in mind for Google:
What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience. What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say ‘perhaps there is a need over here — let’s meet that need’. Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners’ job is — to understand audiences.
