"Going Google" ad blitz targets microsoft

In an uncharacteristic marketing move, Google is buying billboard space to taut its Apps.

Google is looking more like Redmond everyday, not only because mutual encroachment has stepped up recently (Google announced Chrome OS, then Microsoft closed its search deal with Yahoo)—but because now they’re  swapping marketing strategies. Goog is getting into billboards, as MS quietly touts the superiority of its product.

In an uncharacteristic move, the search giant is launching a month-long billboard campaign today in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Commuters will be served a series of reasons to “Go Google,” ie, to switch from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook or Lotus Notes, to Google Apps. A different ad will appear each day of the week.

Google is encouraging customers to tweet their testimonials with the #gonegoogle hastag, and provides a resource destination for their new evangelists that includes email templates to lobby IT departments, anonymous posts for display around the office, apps to facilitate the transition, video testimonials and tutorials, and a twitter feed of the hashtag.

Aside from a few TV spots for the Chrome browser, Google has remained a notoriously quiet marketer, relying on unofficial word-of-mouth. A strategy that’s proved effective, driven by testimonies like this particularly powerful one from America’s CTO.  Microsoft is no stranger to ad offensives though—Pete Cashmore notes a resemblance between these ads and the Apple Switch ads from 7 years ago.

Having never had to “Go Google,”—I’ve grown up on the stuff—I'm a fan, but I don’t think Goog will dethrone Office. In the short term, Google Docs is actually my one source of Goog-centric frustration; I’ve used it for three years with a team at work, and have consistently had to invite and reinvite anyone who doesn’t have a personal gmail account—and we use gmail for our corporate email.

Glitches aside, security is an even bigger potential deterant for corporations. Larry Dignan points out that competitors like Zoho allow companies to store their own data. Not every company is ready to jump into the Cloud with both feet. Web-based collaboration is one thing, but hosting all data is another. “If you’re in a heavily regulated industry you’re not going to be emailing Google’s helpdesk trying to track a 2006 email to satisfy a Sarbanes-Oxley requirement.”

In fact, Microsoft has already begun exploiting security and data storage concerns. At Microsoft’s investor meeting Kevin Turner, the software giant’s chief operating officer, said:

Customers don’t want 100 percent of every piece of data for every application managed in the Cloud. They simply don’t. For some users, for some applications, for some competitive reasons or privacy reasons or security reasons, they want to control that and manage it.

Turner gave Lion’s Gate as an anti-example:

I know of a company that I personally visited called Lion’s Gate, the film company, and we went in there. And Google had a big trial and they were rolling it out, and they were unhappy with the security issues, the privacy issues and the performance issues that you continue to read about in the press. In fact, that’s one of my favorite ways to compete against this particular product. It’s just go out on the Web and pull down the outages, the security issues and the privacy issues for the past 18 months and print them out, and you staple it. And it’s about this thick. And you hand it to a CIO and say, “Let’s go through this and really understand what you are getting into.” And so it’s an incredible opportunity for us, again, to get very competitive and to really compete to win in that particular space.

(thanks to Dignan for the quotes).

Microsoft has the home-court advantage on this one, which makes a quiet defense easier. I don’t think we’ll see a glitzy, Blingy marketing response. In the age of the tech giants, quiet marketing campaign seems like a pretty good indicator of product superiority, and vice versa.