The Moment
John was leading Google's Creative Partnerships work, looking for ways Google could be more useful to the creative side of advertising. The company had huge relationships with brands and agencies, and billions of dollars ran through its platforms. Those relationships had a boundary, though. Google mattered when the conversation was about media. When it turned to the idea itself, Google usually wasn't in the room yet.
That struck him as strange. Google had technology, data, talent and a view of how people were behaving online, and very little of it was reaching the creative process. The call came after most of the important decisions had been made. To John, there was obviously more Google could do.
The Diagnosis
John's instinct was that Google didn't need to sell more. It needed to widen the relationship. Simply announcing that Google was now a creative partner wouldn't work either, since nobody would believe it just because it was on a slide.
Google had to earn it by being useful. That meant spending time with creative people, learning what they were up against, and finding the places where Google could add something. Sometimes that was data. Sometimes technology. And sometimes it was just introducing the right people to each other. The goal was to give creatives a reason to call Google earlier.
The Work
The team tried a lot. Some programs stuck and others were dropped quickly, which was the plan all along: test widely, find a wedge and build from there.
Unskippable Labs came out of questions the team kept hearing about what worked on YouTube. Instead of handing agencies another list of best practices, Google tested creative alongside them, putting long-held beliefs up against how consumers responded. Some of those beliefs were confirmed. Others weren't, and those turned out to be the more interesting findings.
The Exploratory took a different angle. Creative teams got access to Google technology and room to experiment, with no answer they were being steered toward. The pitch was basically: here's what we have, what could you do with it?
Then came The Assembly, which brought more than 70 senior creative leaders into an ongoing relationship with Google. John valued it because these were people Google wanted to learn from, including when they disagreed. Having them close changed the conversation inside Google as much as it changed Google's standing with the industry.
Over time the experiments stopped looking like separate projects and settled into a model, and John's team built around it. Creative Works expanded beyond the U.S., and the team built Google's global Creative Partnerships organization to take the approach to markets around the world.
The Outcome
The work got Google into different conversations and different rooms, and eventually a seat at the table.
Brands and agencies started bringing Google in while they were still deciding what to make. Before, they came once the work was done and all they needed was somewhere to run it. That opened relationships with people Google hadn't traditionally worked with and gave it a broader role with some of its biggest customers.
The program scaled globally, which mattered. What John is proudest of, though, is that people started calling Google for something different. Even with Google's size and reputation, that was harder than it sounds.
What This Means for grIP Clients
Many companies have more opportunity inside their existing customer relationships than they realize. What's missing isn't always more customers, a new product or another sales channel. Sometimes a company has been put in a box, and over time everyone, its own people included, accepts that this is its role.
John likes working on that problem because the fix is rarely a positioning exercise or a new pitch deck. It starts with understanding why the relationship has a boundary at all. From there, he looks for where the company can be useful in a new way, then builds something that proves it belongs there.
It's what he did at Google, and it's where he starts with grIP clients: figuring out what their customers could be calling them for that they aren't today.