I used to work on Altavista. We met them just as they were transforming from a bunch of dedicated and talented search engineers into a bunch of starry-eyed dotcom marketeers. Mostly because of Compaq and the infamous Rod. We did some nice ads, and arguably spent more money than we should have, but they went absolutely crazy with branding madness, doing one of the grossest launch events I've ever seen.
Anyway...while this was going on we used to go and visit them in Palo Alto (was it Palo Alto? I think so, I can't actually remember) and we'd drive by this office that had a banner saying google hanging out the window. Just a amateurish, fun, engineery kind of thing. And even at the time I thought, hello, that's what we should be doing, that's where altavista's going wrong. All this bombast is killing us. And if only I'd bothered to mention it to anyone I could be seen as a seer now.
Of course most of google's success is down to their superior technology. But it's help consderably by the warmth, humour and focus of their brand. The fact that they're willing to take the piss out of themselves and play with their brand takes the edge of their techiness without getting all slick and marketingy. This is a great example.
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