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MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
Good morning, everybody.
How are you.
All well?
Hopefully we'll make this a bit interactive.
Who found the cards?
Have you found your cards?
OK, so I want to ask you just a couple of questions to get
started, if I may.
You can vote with whichever color.
I'm not quite sure how we're doing the two--
I'm just starting with one thing.
Whatever color you like, just hold it up.
So how many people have a smartphone?
Yeah?
Whoa.
Pretty much everybody.
Thank you very much.
OK.
This is good.
I like it with the cards.
It's good.
OK, how many people have used maps on their smartphone in
the last two days.
In the last two days, pretty much everybody.
95% of people with smartphones are using them to navigate and
find locations.
So what else?
How many people have checked in on Foursquare or some other
service in the last couple of days?
Probably about half the audience, maybe slightly over
half, which is interesting.
And actually I think Foursquare are up to over a
billion check-ins.
We'll hear from Evan later about what all that means,
which is fascinating.
So I think just those questions tell us something
about why we're here today.
Now when Russ first said to me, I think we should do an
event called Think Local, I said, what
are you talking about?
I spend my entire time talking about, think global.
Think global, because if you're a business in Scotland
selling kilts, and you had a shop, then previously, all you
could do was sell kilts to people who
came near your shop.
Now you can sell kilts to anybody in the world who's got
a computer and is on the internet, one of 2 billion
people who type "tartan" or "kilt" or "sporran" into the
search engine.
So suddenly, you can think global.
2 billion people are your potential audience.
In fact, there's a guy called Nick Fiddes who runs a company
called Scotweb in Scotland, who does just that.
And 70% of his sales come from outside Scotland, thanks to
the internet.
So I spend all my time talking to businesses, particularly in
the UK, about thinking global.
So why would we want to think local?
And then also the UK is really good at this stuff.
Some of you may have heard me saying this before, but I'm
going to keep saying it, because I don't think
everybody gets it.
The UK is good at this ***.
2 billion people worldwide online, on computers.
There are going to be 5 billion people online by the
end of the decade.
And the UK is the number one nation for e-commerce.
We buy more online per head than any other nation.
The GDP contribution of e-commerce in the UK we
calculated last year with some economists--
over 7% of UK GDP comes from the internet economy.
That's us buying stuff online, paying for our broadband,
playing for our devices, or not in the case of the person
who's going to win the lovely Samsung tablet.
So there's a huge contribution to the economy.
If you look at Germany, if you look at France, if you look at
the US, it's more like 3% to 4% of GDP.
So we're ahead of the game on this.
And actually, it's businesses like Scotweb, it's the small,
niche, formerly local businesses who are doing all
this stuff and doing this stuff well.
So actually, my message is almost always, think big,
think global, because you've got access to a global market.
So what on Earth are we doing an event for Think Local for?
I really don't know.
So I asked the question.
Why?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we here?
Why are we doing that?
And actually the answer was sort of
staring me in the face.
So firstly, I just looked at Google search.
On desktop, about 20% of our searches
have a location element.
I'm looking for something near here or there, or I'm looking
for a new house in this particular area.
About 20%.
On mobile, it's 40%.
So double the proportion of searches on mobile have a
location element.
And we just demonstrated how many of us are looking for
things locally on our smartphones.
And we know the growth in the smartphone market.
Secondly, fairly recently the use of Google Maps on mobile
overtook the use of Google Maps on desktop.
So we now get more Maps users on mobile
than we do on desktop.
So this suggests that this is really something that's
important to people.
And we know that 95% of smartphone users are searching
for local services and products and for maps.
So it seems like it's an important time to be asking
the question, "where" and thinking about local.
And I think the most important thing for us at Google, when
we think about local, is to think about it as another
aspect of context.
Who are you?
What are you looking for?
Where are you?
And if you bring those things together, that set of
different data about context can allow you to be more
relevant and more targeted and more engaging than previously,
if you put those three things together.
So where is something near me right now?
I'm somebody who's been looking on the internet for a
pair of shoes.
I'm walking down the street, and I'm alerted by my phone
that I can buy them over there for this much off by the end
of the day.
That kind of thing creates real value-- real value for
the merchant or the retailer, real value for the user in
presenting them something that's sensitive to that
context of who, where, and what.
And I hope that some of these things will come through as we
look at the agenda for today.
We've got some amazing speakers who will help us to
see how they're wrestling with adding this local context to
the other information that they've got, thinking about
how they can drive more people to their stores, how they can
win in a local environment where that context allows them
to be more relevant and more engaging.
Now Rory Sutherland, who we sometimes have at events like
this, and is a great thinker on the psychology of
marketing, talks a lot about the importance of "where" in
the context for targeting.
And his example, which I'm going to just repeat in a less
amusing way, is this.
Actually, let's use the cards.
Raise your cards.
How many people have got in their home a bottle of a drink
which they've drunk on holiday but they've
never drunk at home?
Is it ouzo?
Keep it up if it's ouzo.
Nope?
What have you got?
Nobody will admit.
All kinds of strange liqueurs.
That's a good example of context, right?
On holiday, in the sunshine, at the end of a long day, ouzo
seems like a great drink to drink.
Take it back home to rainy London, actually you never
want to touch it, do you?
So there's an example of context and why "where" is so
relevant to our behavior, and has an impact on what we do
and who we are when we move around the place.
The other thing we talk about with smartphones, and we'll
see a lot to think on on mobile today, is not just that
it knows where you are, if you give it permission, but also
that it brings the entire internet to you.
So it can bring all of the information on the internet,
all of the "what," it can bring all of the people you're
connected with to you.
And it can bring all of the computing power of the
internet to you at a point in time.
So you can take a photograph.
You can scan a barcode.
You can tap and pick up on an NFC chip information, whether
it be marketing information, point-of-sale information, or
other information you're interested in, and convert
that to something that's useful on your phone.
So I think that that technology, that connection
with all of the people, all of the information, and all the
power of the internet, is something that also transforms
our ability to make ourselves relevant and engaging on a
local level.
So I think that's probably enough for me to start, by
setting a bit of context, bringing it all together-- the
who, the what, and the where.
How do I drive people to my store?
How do I make my service more relevant, more engaging, and
more successful in the local context?
We know that 70% of us are searching
online to find stores.
We know that 20% of us are buying in stores after
conducting some kind of a local search.
And that's why we're all here today.
So I think Russ was right.
It is the time for us to think local.
It's also the time for us to think global, and if that's
not complicated enough, it's probably time for me to get
off the stage and make way for some people who can illuminate
us a bit more.
So thank you very much, and have a great day.