Russia Special: Google's Marco Cremona

Marco Cremona is google-eyed with glee about his new role leading the tech giant’s marketing ops, its Creative Labs, in Russia. Here, the former Y&R Moscow ECD tells Carol Cooper about the the nation’s ad scene and his task to stimulate amour for the popular algorithm-muncher

When was the last time you had a good night out with your search engine? Dinner, a film perhaps, later at home you might whisper tender nonsense into its virtual ear about how you know it seems you take it for granted – just pumping it for info all the livelong day – but you really do love it. Like the protagonist of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, who ends up in bed with his operating system, it’s not just data you’re after but dating, too.

Google’s marketing teams, dubbed Creative Labs, are kean to encourage us to feel all soppy towards our digital tools – their mandate is ‘to remind the world what it is that they love about Google’ and this autumn, Marco Cremona quit as ECD at Y&R Moscow to join the mission, setting up a one-man team in Russia to represent Google’s EMEA Creative Lab.

The Italian creative’s brilliant career has seen him work all over the world for major agencies. Before his recent two-year role at Y&R Moscow, he was ECD at McCann Erickson – at their Moscow office throughout 2011, and in Milan between 2008-2010. His long relationship with Y&R has included roles, between 2002-2008, as CD at the LA office then as ECD at their Milan HQ. Prior to this he held copywriting positions at Lowe in São Paulo, Milan and London, and at Leo Burnett in Milan. The latter was his first network agency employer after, as a 22-year-old he joined his father’s eponymous Milan-based agency, Albert Cremona, and learned the ropes as a copywriter. As a boy he’d dreamt of being a “footballer, rock drummer or an author”, but advertising was written in his stars. “When I was a kid, my dad, who was a CD, used to take me to his office. Seeing him wearing jeans and a T-shirt, joking with colleagues in rooms full of colourful markers and weird sketches – it seemed like Disneyland to me.”

Top Tolstoy action and Nobel causes

He took his career in Disneyland seriously though, studying communications and media at Berlin School of Creative Leadership then at Boston University and going on to work with Y&R for top clients, from Unilever to Land Rover. Between 2008 and 2011 he was President of Italy’s ADC and he’s bagged a slew of top awards. At Cannes this year he helped Y&R Moscow bag three silver Lions  – The Life-Saving Cable for Nar Mobile won a silver in Mobile, while Movies That Change Lives picked up silvers in PR and Promo & Activation.

“Nothing matches the burst of sunny energy that great ideas bring me,” he says when I ask him for his personal career highlights. He lists three Lion-winning campaigns – Reveille for excite.com while he was at Lowe in 2000, the 2005 Telecom Italia spot Gandhi, directed by Spike Lee, while at Y&R and McCann’s 2011 Durex Lubes print ad Club Crasher. It’s interesting that he uses the word ‘sunny’ to describe his energy levels, as he seems an unfailingly upbeat type with just the sort of playful can-do attitude to suit Google.

As yet, Cremona doesn’t have any finalised Google work of his own he can talk about, but two recent campaigns from the Moscow base are the Russian reshoot of the Talk to Google spots for the Google App and a mammoth collaboration between Google and The Leo Tolstoy Museum-Estate; a 30-hour live relay reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Kicking off in Moscow’s state library, then travelling to other major cities around Russia and the globe, the recitation was performed in Russian by more than 700 people in a Google Hangouts conference and broadcast live on a Google+ page. The project typifies Google, not just for its innovation but for its wholesomeness, too. Indeed, when I ask Cremona what he wants to achieve in his new job he replies: “I’ll use an inspiring quote from one of my bosses, Robert Wong [co-founder and CCO of Google Creative Labs]. He says that if in advertising the highest achievement is to win a Cannes Lion, at Google we can aim for the Nobel Prize.”

Aspiring to be awarded for achievements that benefit mankind, rather than just agency success, is very much the company line. Famously founded by two uni dudes in a garage in 1998, the world’s biggest brand is keen to present a cuddly frat-boy face – to convey that it hasn’t moved far from its funky start-up roots. One of its London offices is called Campus, it plays April Fool’s pranks, the walls of its New York HQ bear such slogans as ‘all my shit’s online’ and Wong even urges his team to “Do epic shit”. Cremona and his fellow Lab dudes have been asked to “know the user, to understand the magic in our products and to connect the two”.

However, you could view the sheer scale of the company and its exponentially advancing ‘magic’ as some seriously scary ‘epic shit’. It’s worth an estimated US$395 billion, is continually amassing not just big data, but truly massive data, from the accumulated minutiae of our lives. It’s been assembling Earth’s biggest artificial intelligence lab, by hiring leading experts and buying up such companies as Boston Dynamics, which makes uncomfortably lifelike military robots; Nest Labs, which can render your home ‘conscious’ with its smart thermostats etc, and British AI startup DeepMind, which cost a tidy £242 million. The visionary computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, now Google’s director of engineering, believes ‘the singularity’ – the point at which man and machine will converge as computers achieve something like consciousness – can be reached in little over a decade. If anyone can achieve it, Kurzweil’s team will. The future in short, belongs to Google.

Hardly surprising that the corporation wants to reassure us with its products’ emotional, touchy-feely aspects. Stressing the human element, the man (and woman) rather than the machine, it has come up with such smart campaigns as its first TV spot in 2009, Parisian Love for Google Chrome, a genius boy-meets-girl tale told through keyword search terms, and the viral interactive campaign for Google StreetView in 2010, The Wilderness Downtown, which allowed users to create a music video set on the street where they grew up.

The simple joys of a Soviet aftertaste

The Creative Labs’ practice of having small teams which collaborate with external agencies/creatives is particularly relevant for Cremona’s lone operation and he has “a pool of talented local and international agencies that work with us”. As most of the agencies in Russia seem to import foreign creatives, I wonder if the ‘pool of local talent’ is quite as deep as one would wish. I ask Cremona if the imports are about bringing in a more Western approach to the work, or if they’re down to a lack of marketing expertise in the country. “The demand for talent in Russia is far higher than the supply,” he admits. “The positive side of it is that there are many opportunities for professionals. The downside is that often you’ll find a youngish copywriter who’ll advance quickly through agencies until he becomes creative director in just a few years. This is deleterious both for the agency and for the person, who doesn’t have the experience to lead a team and to establish a profitable relationship with clients. Because of this, importing talent is popular, especially in management positions.”

I wonder if, after living in Moscow for three years, Cremona has come to understand the country that Winston Churchill described as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. “I’m far from understanding the Russian culture. People are tough on the surface but often very friendly once you get to know them. A good way to describe them is that they are just like vodka: at first very cold, then very hot.” He is in awe, though, of the nation’s artistic, musical and literary treasures. “Russia has an unparalleled literary heritage. The best copywriters of all times – from Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky. It has everything to be the best creative country in the world,” he says. “Advertising is only 23 years old here and there’s still a long way to go, but though the local ad industry has been lagging behind, what it is showing in terms of potential indicates the end results could be amazing.”

Considering advertising is so young there, I ask Cremona if he notices any aspects of work left over from the days when there was no advertising, only Politburu propaganda? “We’re the sum of the experience we have lived so it’s impossible not to feel a Soviet aftertaste in modern Russia. And many times it’s a pleasurable taste, made of simple joys, windswept faces and melancholic souls.”

Of course it’s not easy to identify Russian cultural motifs in a country with 11 different time zones, a huge array of cultures, languages and peoples – from Slavic to Finno-Ugric, and a bewildering mix of mores, religions and buying habits. So how do advertisers meet the challenge of marketing to such a diverse country, which also has very different demographics between city dwellers and the rural population? “I see this as a great opportunity for Russian advertising,” he says sunnily, likening it to the Brazilian market. “Having to communicate to the illiterate and Nobel Prize-winners alike, [Brazilian ads] often simplify the message and sometimes use just a headline-less picture, like DM9’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning Antarctica campaign for Guarana in 1993. Gandhi used to say that ‘simplicity is the essence of universality’. Also, sometimes companies split campaigns – delivering a more sophisticated message to the cities and a more mainstream one to the regions. Telco companies like Beeline, MTS and Megafon have done this, as they have such a wide range of targets to reach.”

The big bear and the golden Lions

When shots last explored Russia’s ad scene in 2012, there was a sense that clients’ conservative, risk-averse behavior was hampering creativity. Does Cremona see the same problem two years on? “It’s clear that the power of creativity in terms of economic impact can’t be ignored. Russian clients do understand this and many are now striving for better quality.” This attitude shift is paying dividends. In Cannes 2013, Ekaterinburg-based agency Vokshod won four gold Lions. This year Russia brought home its first Grand Prix with the MegaFaces Pavilion installation for MegaFon and then there were Y&R Moscow’s three silver Lions, for which Cremona is justly proud. “We developed The Life-Saving Cable for Azerbaijani telecoms company NAR Mobile. Azerbaijan has the world’s highest number of Thalassemic births and kids with this disorder need regular blood transfusions. To stimulate the act of donating, which is not popular in this Muslim country, we created a wearable cable via which people can donate battery charge from one phone to the other.” The cables were given away at Nar stores with mobile blood donation centres parked nearby.
The campaign increased the nation’s blood donation rate by 335 per cent. “Movies That Change Lives [for Change One Life foundation] was another a social project that I will never forget for its impact both on the advertising community and on Russian society,” Cremona recalls.  “Potential adopting parents in Russia have to select orphans from an online national archive where they are presented with poor pictures and a one-line description. We invited 10 of Russia’s top directors to spend some time with a child, then write and shoot a short movie with that child as the hero. The ten heroes were adopted in under three months and the government agreed to collaborate in upgrading the national archive.”

Speaking of government responses, another challenge facing advertising in Russia is censorship. Television is the nation’s primary media platform, yet the state owns, or partially controls, two-thirds of Russia’s TV network and is keen to exert control. For example in 2012 it imposed a ban on advertising beer on TV. “There are some strict laws in place,” admits Cremona. “Most ad agencies even have internal legal departments to specifically deal with these issues. TV stations are pretty vigilant. An amusing example of this is that even when it was possible to advertise beer on TV, there was a rule that no living creatures could be shown. A Baltika beer ad got censored because although there was no human being depicted, at one point it showed a fish being barbecued and, because it was regarded as a living being, the fish had to be substituted with a fish kebab!”

The Yandex/Google face-off

Though in 2012, Federal TV was Russia’s main platform, online advertising was beginning to develop. “Digital penetration is increasing and Russia now has the highest number of internet users in Europe,” states Cremona. “Mobile is playing a leading role and the only barrier still to be dealt with is the perception of high connection costs, which prevents many Russians extensively using the web on mobile.” Nonetheless, with 61.3 million internet users in Russia social media is becoming an increasingly attractive marketing tool, “Social media is a wonderful channel for campaigns with high viral potential,” says Cremona. However in September of this year Russia’s communications regulator ordered Facebook, Twitter and Google to join a register of social networks and agree to store data about their users’ communications on Russian servers or face a fine of 500,000 rubles (£6,763). Companies failing to register within 15 days of a second order from the regulator will be blocked in Russia. It’ll be interesting to see how Google responds to this and Cremona was not in a position to comment, “As to new laws and regulations it’s difficult to make forecasts on how they will effect the industry, as it’s early days.”

But, notwithstanding state interference, social media is still attractive to advertisers, though it’s the national networks that are the most popular. The two biggest are Odnoklassniki, which connects old friends and classmates and has 30 million users, and vKontakte (VK), Russia’s version of Facebook, which is the second biggest social platform in Europe, with 49 million Russian users. In the last year, VK has increased the number of visits by over 22 per cent, while Facebook has dropped by 18 per cent.

Worryingly for Google, another area in which a Russian product trounces a Western one is in search engines. Yandex.ru is currently Russia’s largest search engine, with 62 per cent of the Russian market – Google has just 27 per cent – and it has advantages over Google that look set to keep it in the lead for some time. Whereas in other countries Google has been able to lure users away from products like Hotmail, Mapquest and even Dropbox to use Google alternatives, in Russia, the Yandex versions of free email, live traffic maps, music, videos, photo storage etc are comparable to, if not better than, Google’s. Plus, having been created specifically for the Russian market, Yandex is also much better for searching its way through the highly inflected, grammatically complex Russian language, beating Google hands down when it comes to parsing user intent over spelling in a non-English search. Yandex is even popular on Android devices and has now launched its own product for handset manufacturers, Yandex Kit, which enables Android to be used without Google and is seeing growing adoption. So how does Cremona see Google’s chances of advancing on Yandex? His response is rather non-commital yet characteristically positive, “Yandex is leading the market and generally we believe that competition is great for the industry, as it stimulates companies to move quickly and develop new services, and gives users a better choice, which is just one click away.”

Making the ad before the product

Though when I talked to Cremona he said he was still learning the ropes at Google, I wondered if he’d yet noticed a different approach to advertising than he was used to in his previous roles. “The beauty of working for the Creative Lab is that sometimes you really get to shape the future of the company. Let’s take the Google glasses example from 2012: the Lab was asked to imagine how the finished product – still in the prototype phase – would change people’s lives. Creatives came up with the famous ukulele video and its content inspired the engineers to refine and enrich their original project.”

It sounds like a fun place to work and Cremona is definitely a good candidate for the role of ‘reminding the world what it is they love about Google’. So, as my all-too-human memory fails and I find myself asking my souped-up search engine for the zillionth time that day, where is my next meeting, what was that thing I ate in Tokyo called and what on earth am I doing on Tuesday, I realise that Google is kind of like a husband and not a bad one either.  In return for a constant readiness to dispense endless facts, plus the comfort of him being the keeper of my history, all I have to do is turn him on. Bless. Google I do love you.