Googling Beauty: Q+A with Google's CPG Sales Head, Kevin Kells

I recently got a chance to sit down with Kevin Kells, Google's
national industry leader f or CPG, over lunch at their cafe-
teria. (BTW/FYI: Google has a "cafeteria" that puts Condé's to shame AND it's free for all the employees. Go ahead, have the salmon!)

Kells (pictured, right) had a lot of interesting things to say about online marketing for CPG brands, and he and his team have been doing a lot of work to break beauty and other CPG marketers from the print/tv spot habit.

Case in point: Google commissioned research firm Harris Interactive to measure the effectiveness of CPG ads (for food, beverage and personal care brands) across traditional TV, the YouTube online video environment and ad-embedded click-to-play video. Turns out those Youtube and Web ads were just as good as the traditional TV spot at driving brand affinity and purchase intent.

Case in point #2: Kell's described one of his favorite case studies to me, in which the Googlers did a campaign for Dove’s Ultimate Clear deodorant, with ads on 271 of Google’s network Web sites and 121 groupings of sites geared toward the 18-34-year-old female target. The effort drove brick-and-mortar sales up 25% during the period. What's more, 96% of that extra boost were new customers for the brand.

But Kells isn't just speaking through his nose. Beauty marketers, he feels your pain. In fact, he used to be one, logging some time in the marketing department over at Revlon, where he handled the Almay brand as  vp-marketing. Before that, he worked over at Unilever and even handled the Guinness account over at Diageo, all before joining up with Team Google in January 2006.

Check out the full story here.