Daily Management Review

Key Advertiser is Leaving Google for Dropbox


06/09/2015


Google could not keep one of the main advertisers, who prefer to go to Dropbox. Vice-president of the advertising department was such a valuable employee, that one day he was paid $ 100 million to only stay in the company.



Neal Mohan. Photo by Forbes.com
Neal Mohan. Photo by Forbes.com
The person in the limelight - Neal Mohan. He has long been the second person in the advertising department of Google. Moreover, four years ago, the company allocated $ 100 million to keep Mohan from going to Twitter. Surprisingly, the cloud service Dropbox was able to do something that Twitter couldn’t – to steal Google’s Vice President. However, thing may be different, as officially Neal Mohan and Google keep silence about the quitting.

The valuable employee joined Google in 2008, when the company swallowed up DoubleClick. In March, the assets worth $ 3.1 billion transferred under the control of the Internet giant, and the transaction is considered to be one of the most successful in the history of Google. Neal Mohan occupied one of the most important positions in the DoubleCLick, responsible for the overall strategy and product development.

After purchasing DoubleClick, Google had an opportunity to improve the system of distribution of advertising content. Giants such as Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oréal, Apple, Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg and so on are among the clients of the advertising company asset today.

In many ways, the growth of Google’s advertising revenue is based on the efforts of Neal Mohan and Susan Vozhnitski, who were responsible for specific agreements. Later Vozhnitski was charged with YouTube - an extremely popular service, which, however, needed to build advertising revenue. Neal Mohan did not follow the colleague, but kept close relationship and direct contact wiyh her. The problem is now that Google, in fact, lost two key figures in the root of the advertising business.

It is possible that Neal Mohan got interested in Dropbox’s ambitions in a corporate environment. Moreover, we can talk about some advertising solutions. At the new place, he met an old colleague - Dennis Woodside, that also left the important post at Google. Woodside ruled Motorola, and after his departure, the asset was sold to Lenovo.

According to the available information, Neal Mohan will be director of products and will replace the post of Ilya Fushman that, in turn, left the Dropbox for positions in Index Ventures in May.

Dropbox’s strategy can now change dramatically. By hiring Mohan, the company realizes that he likes to make decisions with an eye to the future. For example, who advised Goggle to purchase Admeld, Teracent, and Invite Media to bolster advertising business component.

The fact that Dropbox will try to completely replace traditional hard drives, was already known in 2013. Even then, the number of users Dropbox reached 175 million people. Today there are more than 300 million, while service has become almost universal and works on all popular operating systems.