Promoting Google’s Inclusive Marketing Guidelines
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
Year: 2019
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 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.
View them below.
