It isn’t the Googleplex, but the world’s largest online search provider has found a new home for its operations in Orange County.
Google Inc. recently leased space at Impac Center on Jamboree Road in Irvine.
The company now counts more than 100 employees locally, with nearly 8,000 companywide. Google started in OC with just one salesperson in 2001.
The Impac Center office combines Google’s recent acquisition of radio advertising software and services provider dMarc Broadcasting Inc. in Newport Beach with its Southern California sales offices, which used to be on Main Street near John Wayne Airport in Irvine.
In keeping with its tight-lipped reputation, Google officials didn’t provide many details on its local operations. The company wouldn’t say how many square feet it had leased at Impac Center, or how many employees came from each office.
Google continues to expand its Irvine presence and has job openings for its dMarc and sales units, said Diana Pouliot, Google’s regional director of sales.
Pouliot declined to say how many people the company expected to hire in Irvine, but said it was more than 10.
New hires will find the Irvine office space in line with Google’s famously quirky reputation.
Google designed the Impac Center site along the lines of its Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View. There, Google has a large campus that’s become one of the most famous in Silicon Valley.
“We like to call it very Googly,” Pouliot said of Irvine. “We offer a lot of the same perks. We really take the time to create a space where people can have fun.”
Those perks include free lunches at the cafeteria and massages,also at no cost. Google employees can use a game room that features air hockey, ping-pong and other games.
The company encourages employees to use 20% of their time to work on what they think will most benefit the company.
“This empowers them to be more creative and innovative,” the company said in a regulatory filing.
The sales office is the main operation for the Southern California region. Google’s only other site in Southern California is in Santa Monica, where it has an engineering team.
Pouliot opened the Irvine sales office in 2001, putting her among the company’s earlier employees. Google at the time was just starting to gain fame for its search service. It was three years before its initial public offering.
She declined to say what employee number she was at the company.
The OC sales office was among Google’s first after New York outside its Mountain View headquarters.
The company put its Southern California base in OC because of the county’s central location among Los Angeles, San Diego and other cities, Pouliot said.
Google also saw OC as a good place to find and attract workers, said spokesman Michael Mayzel.
The sales office targets five main industries in the Southland: auto, finance, technology commerce, retail and entertainment.
Google sells what it calls AdWords to companies in those industries. Companies pay Google to get their text-based ads placed next to a related search result.
An automaker, for instance, pays the company to make sure its ad shows up next to the search results that an Internet user looking for information on an auto sees by using Google’s search engine.
Google works with clients to come up with potentially thousands of keywords that would put the company’s ad near search results.
In addition, clients get access to a network of other Web sites, including Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, New York Times Co. and AskJeeves, part of IAC/InterActiveCorp in New York.
AOL and the other sites will post the client’s ads near related content, such as a news story. For Web sites in the network, Google clients have the option of displaying ads with graphics and video, not just text-based ads.
Pouliot said her sales staff typically meets potential clients at their offices. Pouliot’s name showed up in an Irvine Chamber of Commerce newsletter in 2003, but Google became better-known in OC when it bought dMarc earlier this year.
Google initially paid $102 million for dMarc. It could pay as much as $1.1 billion more if the radio unit hits sales, advertising and other targets during the next three years.
Brothers Ryan and Chad Steelberg, who have started several other Web-based companies during the past decade, founded dMarc in 2002.
After the acquisition, Ryan became head of radio operations and Chad general manager at the dMarc unit. Google’s plan is to combine dMarc’s technology with its AdWords operation, so companies can send targeted ads to radio listeners.
DMarc’s software and devices are used by radio stations to send messages to listeners. The system also allows stations to more easily schedule and deliver ads and keep track of when they air.
More than 4,500 broadcasters use dMarc’s products, according to the company.
