Live, love, learn and breathe with Google

Have you watched Google’s Super Bowl Ad? If you missed it out like I did, here is the actual ad on Youtube Google Parisian Love. Basically, this ad tells a story of a Parisian romance happened with the help from a series of Google searches.  A young man found his love for life during a study abroad program in Paris. In the entire commercial, there was nothing related to football, no hot girls with gigantic breasts walking around and there were no talking animals. However, such simplicity turned out to be one of my favorites. It reminded me how Google impacts my life on daily bases. As we learnt from Bros. Health (2001), this emotion-based advertising managed to tell the audience a story that can make them smile.

Such an unexpected self-promoting commercial by Google–the search giant/advertising company might seem unnecessary. Google has already reaped billions from online ads with a search market share over 70 percent. In addition, Google the name itself is almost a verb when it comes to search. Especially when this ad had been on YouTube for over three months before it has finally being shared by a wider audience. So why does Google bother?

Google chose to air this ad on the Super Bowl, in my opinion, with a motive of reminding the public about the brand in a positive light. It has not been a good couple of years for Google besides the growing trend financially. With the lawsuit Google was in for offering millions of books free online; the silent game Google chose to play after added feature called “AdSense” advertising criticized by mass as the privacy invasion; not to mention its high-profile threat to stop censoring search results in China. Maybe it is time for Google to have some positive buzz. This TV commercial with no narration received certainly did not disappoint anyone. With largely positive feedback/twits, word of mouth marketing expert David Binkowski twitted that @Google ad was very good. Value proposition was dead on and they told their story extremely well.”

I would like to hear your opinion on this. Do you think it is unnecessary for Google to spend money on the Super Bowl since it has majority market share in search engine? Or do you think Google is making a right move at the right time?