Just four short years ago, Kiley McEvoy sat at his laptop prepping his thesis at Dartmouth in human insight and creativity of the brain, hoping to one day land his dream job in the field of science. Today, the gifted young product manager is living that dream and has taken the reigns at Google headquarters in Northern California. In early August he led the launch of the heavily anticipated, small-business online marketing tool AdWords Express.
McEvoy arrived at Google directly from Dartmouth after one of his professors recommended he would fit perfectly in the role of project manager. He applied and was hired soon after. That was four short years ago and he says he uses the same skills today that he did while in his 10th grade social studies class at where he discovered his passion for science.
“I loved project-based courses and went through AP Physics, AP Bio and AP Calculus. We had to do a hyper-card project that was basically a Powerpoint presentation and I immediately fell in love with it and spent weeks, and nights working on it to make it perfect,” McEvoy said. “It was a presentation on a biography of John Lennon and I was able to find ways to add music to it and all sorts of things that seem very simple now but at the time was not a simple high school project.”
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Formerly released as ‘Boost,’ the user-friendly, AdWords Express allows local “mom and pop” shops to keep up with the Joneses in the virtual world of online advertising. The product is based off of the AdWords product large businesses such as Nike use to advertise its product. With either tool, the goal is getting your business listed on the first page of search results.
“[In AdWords] what we do is run the ads in an auction. If you were the only one bidding, you would appear in that space. But if your competitor is willing to pay more, you would appear lower on the list than they would,” McEvoy said. “Your ice cream store prefers a simpler way to get into online advertising. In AdWords Express we automate a lot of that for the business. We’ve described it as training wheels.”
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McEvoy labored day and night on the 18-month project with several teams including engineers, marketing, sales, public relations and ‘legal eagles’ in order to deliver AdWords Express to the public on time.
“We’ve gone through a series of launches. We started with a Beta and in January we rolled out with a product called Boost and then two weeks ago we re-launched the product as AdWords Express,” he said. “[The customer] writes the ad, which is three lines long, their category and where they want users to end up when they click on the ad.”
McEvoy says the product has proven to be a blockbuster as “tens of thousands of customers from all 50 states” signed up for it within the first two weeks. But AdWords Express is not the only big hit at Google these days. Communications Manager Crystal Dahlen says she wishes she could take credit for hiring McEvoy, whom she calls “brilliant.”
“Kiley looks at problems from multiple facets and that’s helpful to any company because he’s able to see what may be causing a problem and how to fix it,” she said. “Kiley is great about looking at things holistically and breaking them down from there.”
Google software engineer Xuefu Wang agrees and said Kiley’s leadership was pivotal in the launch.
“AdWords Express involves many external components in particular,” he said. “Kiley's ability to define the product, lead and rally the team together to bring all relevant parities on the same page has been invaluable."
The Google star said many small businesses are losing customers at a rapid pace simply because they will not stray from traditional advertising. The Internet has become a one-stop shop for news, entertainment, education and shopping among many more in the 21st century. McEvoy believes AdWords Express will save those businesses from drowning in a sea of antiquated marketing.
“The main mission was to get small business introduced to online advertising. A lot of the businesses just do traditional Yellow Pages advertising,” he said. “When I go in and pull up their business on my phone, it totally blows them away.”
It is no coincidence so many of his peers admire McEvoy’s creativity and acumen in science. The innovative leader received his bachelor’s at James Madison University in Integrated Sciences and Technology in 2005. He then continued his education at Dartmouth, graduating two years later with his master’s in Cognitive Neurosciences and Information and Engineering. While at Dartmouth, he interned with NASA Langley where he designed a camera system to monitor solar sails in outer space.
“I was doing research on a technology called solar sails,” McEvoy said. “It’s basically like where you have a sail on the ocean and the wind can push it. In space, there is a special type of sail and the sun can push it.”
Thinking outside-the-box is how McEvoy got to where he is today. In high school he and his AP Physics group had to pick something to design. While most of his classmates chose robots or video games, McEvoy instead signed up for a contest in Delaware called “The Punkin’- Chunkin’.” He and his team placed third in the student category when they designed and built a 30-foot catapult that launched a pumpkin more than 1,000 feet across an open field.
“We built it over the course of five months or so,” he said. “It sounds funny but it was a great way learn how to work on this.”
Although he loves San Francisco, McEvoy admits he misses his hometown back East where he grew up in the South Run neighborhood and swam competitively for several years.
“I loved the community we had in Northern Virginia. I swam for a few different teams as a child and in high school - South Run Seahawks and Victor Swim for a few years. The South Run neighborhood was a tight-knit neighborhood and all the social events were done together. So, I miss things like that.”
McEvoy enjoys staying competitive at work and in his extracurricular activities out West. He is a Triathlete, road biker, snow skier and spends his weekends building homes for Habitat for Humanity. Yet he still somehow finds time to sleep. McEvoy said working on AdWords Express has been a wonderful experience and he looks forward to leading the launch of more Google products in the near future to instill the company’s mission to “deliver all the world’s information to the user in the easiest possible way.”
“I’ve really enjoyed the process of taking this product from when it started with two to four engineers and myself about a year-and-a-half ago and we built small little test prototypes into the large product it is now,” he said. “Google provides so much opportunity for someone like myself that I can’t see myself leaving anytime soon. I love that process and I imagine I’ll get to do that for more projects in the future but I still have some more time on AdWords Express before I move onto something new.”
One in a continuing series on how local residents are pursuing their version of the American Dream.
