Google Cloud, with Paris agency Herezie, created ten personalised future biographies for French CEOs using predictive data analysis — a direct B2B campaign
How Google Cloud Turned Predictive Data Into a Book for French CEOs
The Biography of Tomorrow is a 2018 B2B direct marketing campaign created for Google Cloud by Paris-based agency Herezie, targeting ten senior executives at major French companies by delivering individually produced physical books that used Google Cloud's predictive data tools to narrate each CEO's professional future across the next ten years.
Google designed the campaign to solve a specific commercial problem. The company was investing heavily in its Google Cloud business and needed to reach the most inaccessible audience in French enterprise: chief executives of the largest firms in the country. Standard digital outreach, media advertising, and event-based marketing were unlikely to cut through at that level. Herezie's response was to abandon digital channels entirely and instead place a physical object — a book — in each executive's hands. Not a brochure or a white paper, but a fully realised hardcover biography, authored by professional ghostwriters, prefaced by an esteemed economist, and published in partnership with a renowned French publishing house.
The mechanics were as precise as the concept was bold. Market data was fed into Google Cloud, which processed and modelled what the following decade of each CEO's professional life might plausibly look like. Those predictive outputs became the raw material for ten unique narratives, each crafted specifically for its named subject. Only one copy of each book was produced, and each copy was hand-delivered to its subject. In France, where the intersection of literary culture and business prestige carries particular weight, the medium amplified the message: Google Cloud is capable of transforming complex data into something both meaningful and personally relevant. The campaign ran in October 2018 and earned a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100, reflecting its creative distinction and strategic precision within the B2B category.
Google Cloud faced a structural market challenge in 2018. According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services held approximately 34% of the global cloud infrastructure market in Q3 2018, larger than the next four competitors combined. Microsoft Azure held approximately 14% market share in the same period, according to Synergy Research Group. Google Cloud sat in third position and was working to close the gap, particularly in enterprise segments where long sales cycles and risk-averse procurement decisions made brand trust and direct executive engagement essential.
In France, digital transformation among large enterprises was accelerating, but cloud adoption decisions at the highest corporate levels were still driven by personal conviction as much as technical evaluation. Herezie recognised that reaching the ten most relevant CEOs required a medium that commanded the same attention and respect those executives would give to a significant business document or a work of serious non-fiction. A physical book, authored with the craft of professional ghostwriters and endorsed by a named economist, achieves exactly that. It signals seriousness, investment, and a genuinely differentiated point of view on what Google Cloud's predictive data analysis capabilities can produce.
The campaign operates within the account-based marketing discipline, in which a brand concentrates resources on a precisely defined list of high-value targets rather than broadcasting to a broad audience. As reported by The Drum, Herezie converted predictive market data into future biographies for targeted executives, framing Google Cloud not as an infrastructure vendor but as an intelligence partner capable of modelling the future of work and digital transformation at the individual executive level. That reframing is strategically significant: it shifts the conversation from price and performance benchmarks — territory where Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are deeply entrenched — toward a more personal and visionary proposition that competitors had not occupied.
The creative execution of The Biography of Tomorrow rests on a disciplined paradox: a campaign promoting a digital product delivered through one of the oldest analogue formats in existence. Herezie chose the book not as a novelty but as the most credible vehicle for the campaign's core argument — that Google Cloud's predictive data analysis is sophisticated enough to generate insight that feels genuinely biographical rather than algorithmic.
Production involved multiple layers of human craft working in concert with machine intelligence. Google Cloud processed substantial volumes of market and professional data to model plausible ten-year trajectories for each of the ten targeted French executives. Those data-driven narratives were then handed to experienced ghostwriters, who shaped the raw predictive output into the register and rhythm of serious non-fiction biography. A publishing house with established credibility in France was brought into the project to ensure the books met the physical and editorial standards that would make them indistinguishable from commercially published works. An esteemed economist contributed a foreword to each volume, adding an independent intellectual authority that no internal Google document could supply.
The result was ten unique objects, each existing as a single copy. That scarcity is itself a creative decision: it transforms a marketing piece into something rare, considered, and irreplaceable. Hand delivery reinforced that signal. A CEO who receives a individually produced account of their own professional future, bound, printed, and delivered with the care of a gift, encounters Google Cloud at a register that no digital campaign can replicate. As noted by Creativepool in its coverage of the campaign, the work exemplifies how data and creative craft can combine to produce something that feels neither mechanical nor generic. Production credits beyond the agency Herezie and the involvement of ghostwriters and the publishing house are not fully documented in publicly available records.
No verified commercial performance data for The Biography of Tomorrow — such as pipeline generated, contracts signed, or revenue attributed — is publicly available. The campaign's impact is instead documented through its recognition across four international award programmes, each of which provides an independently verified signal of creative and strategic effectiveness within the B2B direct marketing category.
The London International Awards granted the campaign a Silver award in its Direct — Business-to-Business category in 2018, representing one of the most credible international benchmarks for direct craft, according to the London International Awards. Eurobest awarded the campaign Bronze in two separate categories in 2018 — Print and Publishing, Commercial Publications, and Direct, B2B — recognising both the production quality of the physical books and the strategic precision of the targeting, as confirmed by Eurobest. In France, ADETEM recognised the campaign with a Bronze at the Prix de l'Excellence Marketing in the Grand Prix Marketing B2B Sophie Callies category in 2018, as recorded by ADETEM, affirming its standing within the French marketing industry specifically.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness derives from two reinforcing mechanisms. First, by producing only ten copies, every unit of investment was directed at a named, qualified decision-maker, eliminating the waste inherent in broadcast approaches. Second, by anchoring the value demonstration inside the product itself — the book is proof of what Google Cloud can do with data — the campaign collapses the distance between awareness and consideration. The Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 reflects that structural intelligence: a rare combination of creative ambition, channel discipline, and a data-driven rationale that is immediately legible to a sceptical enterprise audience.
The Biography of Tomorrow is a 2018 B2B direct marketing campaign by Google Cloud and Paris agency Herezie. It used Google Cloud's predictive data tools to generate ten personalised future biographies for French CEOs, each produced as a unique physical book and hand-delivered to its named executive subject.
Herezie, a Paris-based creative agency, created The Biography of Tomorrow for Google Cloud. Herezie developed the concept, coordinated with ghostwriters and a French publishing house, and worked with an economist to produce forewords for each of the ten individually authored CEO biographies delivered in France in 2018.
The campaign won four international awards in 2018. The London International Awards granted Silver in Direct B2B. Eurobest awarded two Bronze prizes, in Print and Publishing and in Direct B2B. ADETEM recognised the work with a Bronze at the Prix de l'Excellence Marketing Grand Prix Marketing B2B Sophie Callies category, according to each respective organisation.
Google Cloud processed substantial volumes of market and professional data to model ten-year professional trajectories for each targeted French CEO. Those predictive outputs were handed to ghostwriters who shaped them into full biographical narratives, demonstrating Google Cloud's data analysis capabilities through the campaign's physical deliverable rather than through conventional advertising.
Herezie identified that French enterprise CEOs were unreachable through conventional digital channels. A hand-delivered, individually authored physical book commanded the attention and prestige appropriate to the audience. The medium also functioned as proof of Google Cloud's predictive data capabilities, making the product demonstration inseparable from the campaign's creative execution.
According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services held approximately 34% of the global cloud infrastructure market in Q3 2018. The Biography of Tomorrow addressed Google Cloud's enterprise gap not through price or performance claims but by repositioning Google Cloud as an executive intelligence partner, occupying competitive ground that AWS had not claimed in the French market.
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