Machine Dreams
Before I meet Marissa Mayer, the 34-year-old megamillionaire, Oscar de la Renta-obsessed, computer-programming Google executive who lives in a penthouse atop the Four Seasons, San Francisco, I of course Google her.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2009 Marissa Mayer has been built up in print for three years straight: Business Week profiled her hiring machine at Google back in June 2006, she talked through what Google looked like at age ten in September 2008, and in March 2009 she laid out the future of search on Charlie Rose. What is new here is the venue — Vogue, with the Oscar de la Renta fixation and the Four Seasons penthouse, is fashion-media framing rather than tech or business press.
The timing matters inside the corpus: this lands two days after Google reported what it called a very good quarter despite the downturn, and amid its campus-by-campus push to convert universities to Gmail and Docs against Microsoft. A sympathetic, high-gloss portrait of one of Google's most visible executives arrives while the company is working to look like a consumer-friendly brand rather than an enterprise combatant.
First-order effects
- Mayer's public profile expands from tech and business audiences (the Google-at-10 tour) into fashion and lifestyle readership, making her one of the few individual faces attached to Google's otherwise logo-first brand.
Second-order effects
- Google gains a soft-power asset precisely where it needs one — its push onto university campuses and against Microsoft in productivity software depends on appearing approachable, and a Vogue-portrayed executive humanizes that campaign in ways product announcements cannot.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, executive celebrity becomes a deliberate corporate function: lifestyle magazines join the standard circuit of tech blogs and business TV for star employees, and personal brands turn into measurable company assets rather than private reputations.
The trend: Technology companies are increasingly marketing themselves through the personal celebrity of individual executives, with mainstream lifestyle press joining the traditional business-and-tech media circuit.