Newhouse Speaks: Google at 21

October 16, 2019

On a rainy October evening, under dim stage lighting as the four Google colors dance around on the projector behind him, a man in thin spectacles leans over the podium to address a packed lecture hall.

“At Google, we balance on the focal point between people and technology.”

This man is Corey DuBrowa, current vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google. Previously, he worked as executive vice president and chief communications officer at Salesforce. During his time at Salesforce, the company was named Fortune's “Future 50” most innovative company in the world. He was also named “Innovator of the Decade” by Forbes. Prior to this, DuBrowa was senior vice president of global communications at Starbucks. He has a personal connection to Newhouse, one of the country’s top schools for communications. DuBrowa worked as a music journalist for two decades, with publications ranging from Rolling Stone to Village Voice to GQ.

Today’s lecture - Google at 21: Analytics, Insights, and Your Future - is part of a speaker series, Social Commerce Days, sponsored by the Newhouse W2O Center for Social Commerce.

DuBrowa opens his lecture with a discussion on the work that his team does at Google, which is to explain why technology matters. They often run into challenges, including regulations and ethics debates as well as conversations around access and diligence.

In spite of this, however, he says that “I remain a technology optimist.”

On the subject of the importance of human capital, He recounts that, in his experience, students have said that tech would be more important in the field of communications. People working in the industry, however, have said that human capital would be more important.

“Our field really isn’t that binary.”

There has always been a polarity between people and technology. He has frequently received questions about whether one would outweigh the other in terms of importance. Simply put, he views them both as important. A point that he kept coming back to during his lecture was the role of analytics in the work that communicators do, and how it is used to build and measure trust.

He referred to Edelman’s annual trust barometer as a point of measurement. Just within the past year, of the four cohorts - business, media, government, and NGOs - trust dropped simultaneously. This, he says, indicates the state of trust in the world around us today.

Maintaining and improving this trust is the responsibility of companies such as Google. DuBrowa couldn’t help making a reference to Spider-man when this subject came up:

“With great power, with great opportunity, comes responsibility.”

In addition to trust, DuBrowa highlighted another of Google’s missions: developing products to help solve persistent global products. What shape that help takes and how it is used, is what their scientists have focused on in recent years. This has lead to investment in AI to help scientists in India better predict monsoons. It has also lead to the development of the camera feature in Google Translate, where a user can open the app, focus their camera on a sign in a foreign language, and the app will provide a direct translation over the sign itself, tearing down language barriers

Another focus of Google is assisting small businesses. In terms of ‘help’, Google attempts to connect small business with their customers. Only 50% of these businesses have websites, which makes Google Maps and Google Reviews so important. This helps to advance small business. He recounts that, in 2019, there are 350 times more local searches and “near me” searches than there were in 2016. Additionally, U.S. women-owned businesses peaked this year.

DuBrowa also took this opportunity to discuss a new realm that Google is launching headfirst into: video games. Earlier this year, Google announced a video game streaming platform called Stadia. The story was picked up and covered by the UK office of Wired, a magazine with a finger on the pulse of the evolution of technology. You can read their article on Stadia here.

Google’s Stadia will officially launch on November 19th.

In general, DuBrowa gave off the impression of a measured, yet curated form of optimism that I haven’t seen before in a professional. It was inspiring.

“A reason why I believe in the future is I believe in people.”

You can learn more about the W20 Center for Social Commerce and their events here.