Is Google Customer Service Hurting The Brand?

Through its short but illustrious history, Google has largely avoided the kind of bad PR that seems to inevitably plague a brand of such power and scale. The brouhaha over the brand’s decision to cooperate with Chinese authorities despite a pledge to “Do no evil” was quickly forgotten. The only real PR “disaster” on Google’s record is over an offensive Michelle Obama image in its top results. All that may soon change if Google cannot manage the growing problem over its customer support for the brand’s Nexus One “superphone.”

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So having never sold hardware before, it is possible Google did not fully appreciate just how much customer support a first-generation device requires. Evidence? Google’s Nexus One service and customer support is all online.

Magazines Lost a Fourth of Ad Pages in ’09

Just how bad was 2009 for magazines? Try 58,340 pages. That’s the number of advertising pages that American magazines lost last year, according to Publishers Information Bureau figures released on Tuesday.

Between 2008 and 2009, magazines lost, on average, one-quarter of their ad pages—the worst drop in the decade of data that the bureau, which measures virtually all major American magazines, had readily available. It is significantly worse than even 2001, when pages declined by 17.2 percent from the previous year. And magazines ran only about 170,000 ad pages last year, versus about 238,000 in 2001.

Can The Nexus One Add $20 Billion To Google’s Market Value?

How much exactly is the Nexus One line of Android phones worth to Google? The folks at Trefis have modeled Nexus One sales into their financial forecast for Google and estimate that it will account for nearly $20 billion of Google’s market cap (based on its target price pf $659 per share), accounting for 9.3 percent of the total. That is more than its estimated contribution of ad and search partnerships (5.1 percent), Google Apps (3.2 percent) or YouTube (2.4 percent). Only search ads account for more of Google’s total value (68.1 percent).

Papa John’s Becomes Super Bowl Sponsor

Papa John’s Pizza is extending its January “National Football Month” marketing program with something it has never done: sponsorship of Super Bowl XLIV as well as the NFL. The deal makes Papa John’s “Official Pizza Sponsor of the National Football League and Super Bowl XLIV.”

Andrew Varga, CMO of the Louisville, Ky.-based company, tells Marketing Daily that the short-term agreement ending in March came about because “we have been working with NFL franchises in nine local markets over the last three or four years and for the activating programs locally it has been a great sales boost for us. As we started to see better and better results with those nine teams, it made sense to do something bigger with the NFL.”