When The Internship, a comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, hits movie theatres, Google will be taking more than a little interest in how the film is received.
Accurately or not, the film cheerfully plays into geek stereotypes
In an unusual collaboration, the internet giant was closely involved with the film, a $58 million Fox production which features two middle-aged watch salesmen who are determined to get a job at Google.
Amid the comedic hijinks, the film indeed delivers a picture of a kind and gentle Google, a company that offers free food and exercise classes and is in every respect the place you’d like to work. Various Google products get plugs in the film, and co-founder Sergey Brin gets a cameo role.
The favourable PR comes at an opportune moment for Google, whose unofficial motto is Don’t Be Evil, but which is often portrayed in far darker tones by privacy advocates, antitrust regulators and competitors such as Microsoft.
The US Federal Trade Commission recently began exploring a new set of antitrust allegations against the company, sources told Reuters last week.
“It’s a good move. It’s going to enhance and warm up Google’s image perception,” said former Coca Cola chief marketing officer Peter Sealey, who is an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University and worked as a consultant for Google seven years ago.
The movie is a far cry from the Hollywood experience of rival Facebook. The social networking kingpin did not collaborate with The Social Network, which focused heavily on the conflicts between founder Mark Zuckerberg and his early partners and didn’t make any of them look very good.
“Movies like this are always a risk,” said Howard Bragman, a Hollywood publicist and vice-chairman of the internet image-management firm Reputation.com. “They can be great for employee morale or they can drag it down.”
Early signs suggest Google’s gamble may pay off. The website Marketingland.com said the film was “A fun movie, but also a beautiful Google commercial.”
Shawn Levy, director of The Internship, said Vaughn came up with the premise for the film after seeing a 60 Minutes special that portrayed Google as one of the best places in the world to work. Vaughn arranged a lunch with Wilson and a group of ‘Googlers’ at the company’s Mountain View campus, and sought the company’s participation. Google eventually agreed, and vice president of marketing Lorraine Twohill oversaw the project.
CEO Larry Page said at a recent conference that Google agreed to collaborate partly because executives felt they didn’t have much choice, but also to promote science and technology.
“The reason why we got involved in that is that computer science has a marketing problem. We’re the nerdy curmudgeons,” Page said at the Google IO conference.
Google insisted on creative control over how the film portrayed its products, Levy said. Such agreements are fairly common when auto makers and other companies strike deals for their products to appear in movies.
The company was closely involved in assuring authenticity when production shifted to Georgia Tech, where the film crew built a reproduction of Google’s campus, right down to the slides that employees use in the lobby of its buildings and the “nap pods” where they can rest during the day.
Levy said the company’s input was limited to technical issues rather than plot.