Turns out there’s a ‘write’ way to promote internally
I’m the author and editor of go/in, Google’s internal guidance for inclusive marketing. Beyond the brand guidelines, I also teamed up with an impressive crew for creative ideation and copywriting to help promote our new work internally to thousands of employees.
What I did
Project
Role: Brand Writer + Editor in Chief, Standards (go/standards)
Company: Google’s Brand Studio
Problem
Inclusive marketing is a priority at Google. While they had some guidance previously, it wasn’t actionable and it lacked the nuance needed to help make marketing and advertising better.
As the brand writer, I helped shape the content, narrative, and tone in addition to supporting the internal campaign work that would help generate awareness of the new guidance.
Solution
Partnered with a team of creatives and strategists to produce new guidelines that reflected the research and insights that prompted the revamp.
Made the home page a welcoming place that shared our manifesto.
Made the guidelines actionable with steps (before, during, after, and audience-specific, plus live examples.)
Leaned on benefit messaging in addition to product and customer insights to conceptualize the campaign components.
Impact
Company-wide brand and marketing guidelines for inclusion hosted on internal brand guidelines website go/standards, impacting thousands of Google creatives, marketers, and agencies.
Syndicated on go/marketing, Google’s internal marketing website.
These guidelines were used to develop executive thought leadership in 2019 for Adweek, and as public guidelines in 2021.
Writing examples
Friendly home page messaging
This was our chance to share the group’s thinking about why inclusion matters. It reads as a manifesto because it is one.
An actionable table of contents
The page navigation was a chance to make the content as actionable and clear as possible.
A spotlight on FAQs
Previously the FAQs were buried in the back of the guidelines. I moved them to the home page to help people get answers quickly.
Highlighting good examples
In this net new section, I opted to share quick, positive insights for the best recent work across the company. Not calling out any “bad” work was part of the strategy in an effort to avoid embarrassing anyone. In addition, I hoped the positive reaffirmation would encourage Google marketers to submit their own great work to the inclusive marketing team for a chance to be showcased it on go/in.
Internal campaign
Writing the guidelines wasn’t a guarantee that anyone would read them. That’s why I teamed up with a group of creatives as a conceptual copywriter to come up with ways to promote our work to the company. We landed on three creative strategies for posters that were put up around campus:
Benefit messaging from go/in guidelines;
Social feedback from real people on YouTube: By showing real comments from work we produced on YouTube (which is owned by Google)';
Scripts showing live changes with Google Docs.
Public project extension
The strategy and content I wrote lives on today in the public projects listed below.
See ‘All In,’ Google’s public inclusive marketing guidelines answer to go/in
All-in.withgoogle.com was launched in 2021, and is the public version Google’s inclusive marketing guidelines (go/in) that I wrote. All In features the audience guidelines only.
The public blog post announcing the launch shares some of the strategic parts that help make marketing great at Google that were also included in go/in.
See SVP Lorraine Twohill’s tips for Adweek, taken directly from the go/in guidelines
In late 2019, Google felt compelled to share the insights we gleaned from our inclusive marketing work via our executive team. The Adweek article by Lorraine is behind a paywall, but you can see the full piece on Think With Google. This content is deeply inspired by the foundational insights in go/in, the inclusive marketing guidelines I wrote.