I recently got to sit in on the first presentation of results from a joint research program between Google and my holding company, WPP. At the Google office in NYC on November 3, a handful of people got the chance to see what a group of professors from around the world were able to do thanks to receiving data from the Google vaults. It was a great time-out from the day-to-day, and I hope the first of many more experiments and presentations in the years ahead as we all try to figure out how to best deploy digital marketing.

The Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program was first announced last fall as a way for these two advertising giants to crack the code with the help of university professors. A group of more than 100 professors, corporate marketers, and agency strategists applied for 25 grants in the range of $50,000 to $80,000 each. The key topic areas for the research focused on understanding online advertising and the link between offline and online.

Let me first say that I think this is a very meaningful partnership between Google and WPP. The two companies coexist as what WPP’s leader, Sir Martin Sorrell, calls “frenemies.” That’s a combination of “friend” and “enemy” in case you missed it, and it shows how in business today—and especially in new ground such as digital marketing—the rules are undefined, and your customers are often your competitors as well. The idea to sponsor a joint research program came out of friendly discussions aimed at helping build a stronger understanding, if not a trusting relationship, between the two heavyweights.

I learned a few interesting nuggets from the research presentations that are worth sharing here in summary. But stay on the lookout for the full research reports, which both companies promised to share publicly soon:

• It can be more effective to give users of Google Maps fewer options (i.e., for resizing, zooming, sorting), suggesting that they will spend too much time “fiddling with the knobs” and missing their core goal.
• Chinese consumers who are exposed to more display ads for brands shift their search habits toward more brand search over category search.
• Display advertising can be much more effective if you are able to learn about the reason/motivation behind individual users’ website visits (but the challenge lies in understanding their motivation).
• Brain scanning suggests that written copy can be more emotionally engaging than photos and video, as people likely internalize the written word more.

Aside from this specific research, I also learned a little about how Google is constantly experimenting on its own search platform. During his opening keynote, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian mentioned that the staff at the company is constantly tinkering with the user experience of the site to improve results. He said, “Every time you use Google there are six to 10 experiments that you are participating in.” That adds up to about 11,000 experiments a year. This attitude of constant improvement is something pretty typical of strong e-commerce sites, where you can actually see the cash register ring instantly when you test something new, and have a strong incentive to roll out the improvement quickly. But the scale of Google’s experiments was staggering. This philosophy of constant improvement suggests that any challenger will not only have to do something different initially, but keep upgrading continuously to make a difference. I doubt that Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing are even close in this regard.

Applications for the 2nd annual round of research are coming in now, and there are already more applications than last year. In fact, my Analytics & Measurement team here at Bridge Worldwide just applied with a client of ours. We hope to receive funding so that we can run a test of the ROI on social sharing from a brand website. Fingers are crossed that we make the cut.

On a final note, I just found out that I have been invited to forge another WPP/Google bond—albeit a more modest one—by speaking at Google’s office on December 8 as part of its Authors@Google program. I’ve always wanted to catch a glimpse of the company’s West Coast HQ and it will be an honor to follow in the footsteps of some amazing speakers who have come through the program. Stay tuned for more on this in a month.