I happened to attend Gray Malin‘s book signing at Google’s Pop-Up store in New York City’s Flatiron district last week. He is a rising fine art photographer who is particularly known for pristine, bright aerial photos, and he was promoting his new book, Escape. Having this art event hosted at Google’s little shop might have seemed apropos, since many assume that his photos must have been made with the help of drones, or that they are digitally manipulated to the stunning brightness they display. But, this isn’t the case.
ESCAPE – book by Gray Malin
I was visiting Manhattan while attending the annual SMX East conference where I spoke on leveraging social media for the benefit for search engine rankings, and I also took the opportunity to check out Google’s trendy little popup store. As I describe in my article about the store, Google seems to be seeking to entertain visitors and to enchant them with their displays and demos at the location. For instance, one wall had a number of reproductions of famous pieces of art hung on it, and signs invited one to use the latest Pixel phone to identify them via invoking Google Assistant.
Malin Gray book signing, Google Popup Store, Flatiron District, New York
Google’s Dracula Logo
Thursday, November 8th, 2012I can’t resist mentioning Google’s Dracula themed logo today celebrating the 165th birthday of Bram Stoker!
Sponsored search results associated with Google's Bram Stoker logo. (Click to enlarge.)
The logo presents scenes from Stoker’s Dracula uber-famous vampire book, done up in a woodcut-illustration style very reminiscent of the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, from the same time period. Dracula was published in 1897.
What may be more significant for search marketers, however, is the special search results page the logo is linked-to, which features Bram Stoker-related books, the Sponsored “shop for” sidebar box and the Wikipedia entry highlights box, along with the usual Universal Search items peppered through the search results listings: news search, author-tagged posts, video and image search results.
This logo and associated search results treatment seems to be specifically designed to help propel featured sponsor ad clicks, as well as to promote Google’s robust search results features.
It calls to question — will Google continue to specifically try to monetize their future Google Doodle logos in a similar fashion?
Tags: advertising, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Google Doodles, Google Logos, search monetization, sponsored ads, vampires
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