Google is planning to reinforce its communications strategy with the Arab users by featuring more doodles that celebrated Arab regional and local events and personalities.
The Google doodle, a feature that was launched in 1999, allows decorative changes to its corporate logo to celebrate events, holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists and scientists.
Wael Ghonim, Regional Product and Marketing Manager Middle East and North Africa, Google, said the company had celebrated Um Kouthoum, the classical Egyptian singer, and Najib Mahfouz, Nobel prize winning author on Google doodles.
"We have a list of more events and personalities to celebrate in our coming doodles for the Arab World, but unfortunately, we do not announce it before hand. However, we will continue to create more doodles for this region, especially commemorating deceased personalities who made major contributions to art, literature and invention in the Arab world," Ghonim told Emirates Business.
The concept of doodling, a bold initiative to play around with the corporate logo of the world's largest search engine, proved to attract many users who would wait for the new doodles and even collect them, serving Google a good marketing tactic.
The doodles have also opened new licensing opportunities for Google-branded items with favourite doodles.
Ghonim said: "Google doodles currently highlight national holidays in Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria."
Ghonim spoke to the newspaper at the conclusion of the Arab "Doodle for Google" competition, the only event in which Google allows users - generally children - to doodle for the brand. Otherwise, the doodles are designed by an internal team headed by Dennis Hwang. The local competition which took place in the UAE, but with a regional outreach, is part of a global competition themed "I love Football!". The competition saw more than 180 children participate from different schools across the UAE and from 33 different nationalities.
As a result, 10 finalists were chosen out of around 200 submissions to be voted online by 50 million users in the Arab World, by showcasing the finalist doodles on Google's specific country websites, said Ghonim. One winner will be chosen to compete on a global level with finalists from other regions in the world. The winner also wins a digital drawing board from Google.
Ghonim said the competition was not organised in tandem with the Fifa World Cup 2010 organisers, which eventually meant that the winning doodle might not be on display on the exact day of the World Cup launch.
"Football is a universal theme after all, and we have no agreement with the Fifa regarding the football-specific doodle," said Ghonim.
Yet, Google had agreed with the Athens Olympics organisers when they featured Olympics-related doodles in 2004. Google also celebrated the Lego brand in 2008 and Tetris in 2009 among others. Despite that most of these brands gain exposure by being featured on a Google doodle, Ghonim said there were no commercial targets for those doodles. "Our doodles are unpaid. We simply try to show our users that we share with the same interests and passions. All the doodles are designed by our designers and no brand has anything to do with those concepts."
In 1999, the concept of the doodle was born when Google founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. A stick figure drawing was placed behind the second "o" letter in the word, Google, and the revised logo was intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were "out of office".
By Dima Hamadeh
© Emirates Business 24/7 2010
