Those of us who have worked with Google AdWords long enough remember the good old days of the Google Dance.  The search engine would host an annual party on the campus of their Mountain View headquarters.  This event served as thank you to all external search managers and agency staff who bought and sold Google advertising, 97% of Google's revenue.  There were countless food stations and bars, live bands, DJs, and activities (beach volleyball).   Attendees got that "lousy t-shirt".  Best of all, the product managers and engineers of the respective Google products were posted to stations around the campus.  They demonstrated the products, answered questions, and even gave out business cards.

The event got its name not from the dancing at the party (which there was plenty), but a webmaster's euphemism for the old game of watching one's website "dance" up and down on Google's Page Rank.

But like the first dotbomb in 2000-2001, which cast a pall across the valley, the financial crisis in 2008 has brought layoff and cutbacks. Google had no party at in 2009, their first year of declining revenue since their IPO. Having lost the beach at Google HQ, we must now content ourselves with the Sandbox. "The Sandbox" recalls another pastime of the desperate webmaster, waiting game for the time it took from the submission of a URL to Google to be reviewed by humans, ranked by the algorithm, and then appear in natural search. This "sandboxing" could take 3 months. Today the process takes a few seconds. Human review from Quality Raters comes later.

For its event on 15 July 2010, the Creative Sandbox 2010, Google partnered with Obscura Digital, a leading digital and creative advertising agency to create some clean Google fun with just the right amount of edge: the sketchy South of Market warehouse location, the DJs, and agency hipsters.

The point of the party was to showcase YouTube, world's largest video sharing platform. One of every 5 Google searches is for video, and it costs Google a lot to host and search all this video content. It costs about $700 million per year to do, but revenues are still in the $200 million - $300 million range, so Google is keen to get agencies to start doing more advertising on the platform and has launched a number of nifty ad formats to do it (much more interesting than plain old search ads).

With the party Google wanted to emphasize how hip and cool they are, so they dispatched their slickest New York employees including the new Managing Director of Agency, Terrence Boone to San Francisco. He welcomed the guests to "experiment, explore, and discover" and then unveiled an oh-so-inspiring commercial of all the way the world uses YouTube.

At least the food and drink lived up to the glory days of Google: A parade of delights… ahi tuna in a wonton tortilla, kobe beef roles, pork bellies in soft Chinese buns and to drink, blood orange caipirinhas, blueberry martinis, cranberry Campari cocktails, and so on. The stream of black-clad catering staff were more reliable than the wifi. You can always count on labor supply of San Francisco to be fueled by newcomers, twenty-something dreamers, artists, and bleeding hearts (the top two jobs in San Francisco are maid and waiter), but the guarantee of wifi to 50 top end plasma screens under the freeway is another story.

If the recent Old Spice Guy videos are any indication, the plan video and Madison Avenue are converging, and YouTube is making money, running video ads along side the actual posted videos. In the ads a "ridiculously handsome" man wearing nothing but a towel speaks and performs alluring but preposterous witticisms and acts. Old Spice and advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy are churning out 60 new videos a day, customizing responses to viewers who post comments. There have been some 10 million views in two weeks. It will be interesting to see how much more cologne, deodorant, and body wash Old Spice will sell as a result.

I met some youngsters from ad agency at the party. They didn't know about the sixty year provenance of the ads: the sailor returning home with the smell of the sea, the woman who waits for him, and the whistling refrain. But it doesn't matter. It appears that in Madison Avenue, not to mention Silicon Valley, memories are short.