Viewed from space - courtesy of Google Earth - London's GooglePlex is not as impressive as its legendary San Francisco counterpart.
Occupying less than three floors of an unremarkable block near Victoria Station, Google's UK base of operations offers none of the US campus' landscaped grounds or sun decks.
But inside, the familiar picture of Google soon emerges. The receptionist automatically presumes we're here for an interview - job, that is. Google is hiring as fast as it feasibly can and its friendly open-plan office is in flux as departments swell. Its trademark colours dot the carpets and fearsomely well-qualified people huddle together in "pods", presumably re-imagining the world as we know it.
Those who find it hard to picture Google as a genuine UK operation might be surprised at the extent of the activity here. Home to around 400 staff, many of them engineers on the hunt for new product ideas, the office is also the base for a key Google initiative - to win the trust of the British agency world, which believes Google is after the ground it stands on.
The company's rise has certainly shown little respect for media tradition. In little over eight years, Google has transformed online advertising with a product, AdWords, that dodged old-fashioned concepts of trading in favour of an innovative keyword bidding system.
A straightforward interface allowed clients to manage their own campaigns and, to that extent, the vast majority of Google's direct clients are SMEs. So there's more than a whiff of disintermediation there.
Sir Martin Sorrell, whose network pours $150m of its clients' budgets into the technology giant each year, calls Google "the frienemy", in the suspicion that it harbours ambitions to deal with those clients direct.
This nagging fear, combined with one or two cultural gripes, is at the heart of the UK agency community's wariness. They don't mind having Google on their desktops, but they're not sure they want them on their turf.
"I think Google would be very happy just to work with clients," says Stephanie Carr, deputy managing director of search marketing agency The Search Works. "They have vertical teams that focus on retail or travel, which is exactly how we are set up as an agency.
"They are providing lots of tools to allow people to manage their advertising for themselves - which some companies do. Whether it is their strategy (to deal direct) I don't know, but I don't think they would mind at all."
There are further reservations, such as Google's foundations in heavily automated search advertising, which means that, in the UK at least, it lacks the one-to-one sales culture of a Yahoo! or an MSN, which cut their teeth on display. There is also a feeling that, for all its sunny branding and worker-friendly corporate culture, Google betrays a touch of corporate, new-media arrogance in its dealings with the old media world.
One senior media agency director recalls a Google representative addressing a UK media crowd and being surprised at the tone.
"It was how I imagine ITV talked in 1973 - as if it had a licence to print money. They were behaving like they were the answer to everything, and you think, well, either you are, or you are a sophisticated electronic Yellow Pages."
Ouch. In fairness, Google has worked hard to generate a warm welcome in London, with some success. Well-received schemes such as the GAP (Google Advertising Professional) qualifications and BPF (Best Practice Funding) initiative have brought the industry up to speed with the potential of Google's undeniably ingenious products.
Meanwhile, the recruitment of familiar media faces such as former IDS managing director Mark Howe (as UK sales director, with responsibility for agencies), ex-Trinity Mirror director of strategy and digital Matt Brittin (UK sales director, in charge of client relationships) and ex-OPera head of radio Jonathan Gillespie (head of agency relationships) is an acknowledgement that this powerful US force wants to understand the local media culture.
But the final indication that Google isn't aiming to bypass agencies is that Dennis Woodside, an American who was recently brought in as managing director for UK, Ireland and Benelux, says so.
"Our business is not the agency business," he avers. "The value-add of agencies is much broader than anything we can offer, so I don't see us getting into what the agencies do. What we do is technology, and applying technology to the advertising business."
Wearing an un-Googleish suit, though no tie, Woodside is otherwise very much the Google ambassador - intense, diplomatic and avowedly devoted to the simple power of a good idea.
He shrugs off suggestions that Google wants to be a media giant and paints a picture of an organisation whose one true love is to create innovative software applications. "If you look at the top 10 executives at Google, they all have some sort of engineering background," he says. "That says a lot, because if you think about how decisions are made at our company, the mindset is an engineer's mindset."
Woodside has certainly seen how Google operates at the highest level, having joined three years ago as head of chief executive Eric Schmidt's long-term strategy group at Mountain View. He then spent 18 months as director of emerging markets, opening Google offices across Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, before landing in London in September to a different set of cultural challenges.
Acknowledging that the British agency structure is significantly more entrenched than in the US, Woodside claims this isn't a bad thing. "We need a robust set of partners to address the market - we can't address the market opportunity by ourselves," he says.
"We are much smaller than most of the agencies we work with, from a people perspective. We don't have the same set of relationships, the same skills around planning or buying."
Google's UK sales structure does have a touch of the agency approach about it, however. Small, vertical teams dedicate themselves to particular industry sectors, with a brief to creatively package the company's products for maximum strategic effect.
Each unit comprises a client and agency-focused industry manager, agency-focused account managers, account strategists and a sales planner, whose role is to provide analytical horsepower.
Woodside says its current furious UK recruitment drive is an indication that Google wants to integrate its stable of products, with an aim to provide far more sophisticated solutions than straightforward search.
The campaigns he has in mind are exemplified by one that ran in the US last September for car manufacturer, Saturn. Banner ads zoomed in on the user's nearest car dealership from space, using Google Earth, before showing a video presentation from the Saturn general manager, displaying a 360-degree view of the car and offering directions to the showroom.
Google brings insight, Woodside claims, that nobody else in the process can offer. "Our role is to work with the agencies to help them generate ideas, to help them understand our technology and to help them implement some of those things," he says.
In this sense, Google's UK office is far more than a piece of window-dressing to mask the fact that the real decisions are being made in California. Woodside points to the major engineering and product development presence under his roof. "What we are heading towards is a model where we develop products in Zurich or London for local distribution," he says. "So it is not just about globalising products that are developed at Mountain View."
And at the root of it all, as Google executives are always at pains to point out, are the company's partnerships: with the small companies that host AdSense windows on their own sites; with the eBays, the BSkyBs and the MySpaces to whom Google brings its advertising solutions, and with the creative and media agencies who own the client interaction.
"We are finding our ability to partner is increasingly driving our success," says Woodside. "We paid out $976m to our partners globally in quarter four last year. It's a very partner-driven business now, and that is the third leg of the stool, so to speak. We have hired people who can help us drive those relationships broader and deeper as our product becomes more complex."
Even the most Google-sceptic media folk acknowledge the company's panache and passion for innovation. It is largely thanks to its creative flair that Google has escaped much sniping in its short, explosive life.
Hip, nimble, environmentally concerned and employee-focused, all founded on a brilliant concept that dramatically improved the world's internet experience (free of charge) and ignited online advertising, Google has worked hard to pre-empt the kind of charges usually levelled at big businesses, right down to its informal motto: "Don't be evil."
Always first with the bright idea, the company actually managed to mock itself before anyone else did, announcing spoof products such as Google MentalPlex, the brain-powered search engine, years before The Onion wrote satirically of the company's alleged masterplan to destroy all information it couldn't index.
With financial results announced in January revealing a market capitalisation of around $150bn (£76bn), valuing Google at more than eight times the size of the world's largest ad group, Omnicom, the predictable backlash against such a powerful company is far from wholehearted. Recent acquisitions and developments in the US have indeed sent shudders of disquiet across the wider media world, as Google has bought into radio advertising with its acquisition of automated ad-sales platform dMarc, and launched an embryonic service to broker unsold space in 50 American newspapers.
In most cases though, the concern is what Google could do, rather than what it actually is doing at the moment. Derek Jones, managing director of MediaTel Group, says: "The test will come if they raise their expectations for what they are doing with these trading networks. At the moment, it seems to be complementary to the media owners and not yet treading on the agencies' toes, but if they started to do these things with slightly larger clients, then it might be different."
But as even Google's detractors are obliged to concede, Google toys with so many product ideas, from free e-mail to book digitisation, that it is hard to draw any real conclusions about its future direction. The company's executives innocently suggest that if media moguls want to interpret from Google's activities an underlying plan for world domination, perhaps that says more about them.
"We represent the new way of doing things - the unknown," Google vice-president of content partnerships David Eun recently told the Los Angeles Times. "A lot of the media industry's anxiety about the unknown is placed on us - we must have an agenda, we must be aspiring to be a media company - when in fact we have no such aspirations. We kind of like the way our business runs as it is."
Now if only the media industry could find a way to believe that, its executives could all sleep a lot more easily at night.
THE COMPETITION
2002: Yahoo! apparently tables an offer of $2bn for Google. It's smaller rival's board reportedly judged the business to be worth two-and-a-half times that much, and now Google is far larger, both in terms of market capitalisation and share of search.
2004: Google stops using Yahoo!'s search function and is now its closest thing to competition, taking between 22% and 29% of the US search market to Google's share of roughly half.
Yahoo! fights to catch up, investing heavily in Web 2.0 businesses such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Upcoming and JumpCut and integrating such social media into its search product in an attempt to cut back Google's lead.
2007: The roll-out of Panama, a new ad-ranking system launched this month, placing ads on the basis of price but also relevancy, has been touted in some quarters as a cure to Yahoo!'s ills, but along with MSN, which takes no more than 13% of search, and possibly less than 10%, Yahoo! is widely felt to have lost the pure search race.
GOOGLE'S ACQUISITIONS AND INTERESTS
Google's $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube last year was both its most well-publicised foray into the market and its least typical. More characteristic were its purchase of Pyra Labs in 2003 and Upstartle in 2006, both of which contributed products - Blogger and Writely - quickly incorporated into Google's range of free services. Google Earth, too, was a new iteration of a product called Keyhole, the flagship application of the company of the same name, acquired in October 2004.
Since 2001, and especially since 2003, Google has made more than three dozen acquisitions, most of them small technology start-ups. YouTube was certainly Google's biggest present to itself; perhaps founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recognised kindred spirits in YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - both essentially engineers with a big idea. Google denies that its ownership of YouTube puts it in the content game, pointing out that the site is effectively just a technology solution that commissions no content of is own.
The acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting in 2006 was a less ambiguous attempt to broaden out into a new medium - in this case radio. Google's moves into newspapers, magazines and mobile have been built on the basis of its existing software, while a collaboration with BSkyB also promises to make Google a force in IPTV, when it arrives in earnest.
UK FACES OF GOOGLE
- Mark Howe, UK sales director (agencies)
- Matt Brittin, UK sales director (client relationships)
- Jonathan Gillespie (agency relationships).