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. Check out more about the guidelines here.
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.
