Surprise! Google Airs a Super Bowl Ad

Wired reports: As hinted by CEO Eric Schmidt, Google debuted a Super Bowl ad Sunday. The ad tells the story of a romance helped along by a series of Google searches conducted by (one is left to imagine) a young man whose simple plan to study abroad in Paris ends with his need to know how to assemble a crib.

It was an unexpected move by the search giant, which has eschewed advertising even as competitors Microsoft and Yahoo have spent tens of millions of dollars in advertising to compete with the company that nevertheless retains a search market share exceeding 70 percent.

Google has reinvented online advertising but has done so with no brand advertising itself—unusual not only because even big companies with world-known brands find it helpful to remind the public about themselves in a positive light, but also because, as the behemoth in the search space, it might need to proactively ward off backlash. And Google is not exactly immune to controversy, given its bold initiative to scan the world's books and its threat to stop censoring search results in China—to say nothing of its behavioral targeting strategy.

As blogger John Battelle reminds, Schmidt in 2006 called brand advertising “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.” At something like $3 million per 30-second spot, the decision to start (and perhaps finish) a TV campaign on the Super Bowl is a lot like arranging to fly for the first time on the Space Shuttle. And, since it’s just a series of screen grabs of searches, the suggestions as they take shape, and the results, it must be a contender for the cheapest-ever Super Bowl ad.

In fact, the ad wasn’t even produced for the Super Bowl. Schmidt said in a post on the Google blog that the ad, “Parisian Love,” has been on YouTube for over three months and that the company decided “to share it with a wider audience.” Considering that the estimated worldwide audience for Super Bowl XLIV was about 1 billion people, that is an exponentially wider audience than the 1.2 million hits the video has online as of this writing.

“We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search,” Schmidt said in the post. “Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users and how they interact.”

Reaction to the TV ad, which has no narration and a gentle soundtrack, was quick and largely positive. Word-of-mouth marketing expert David Binkowski said on Twitter that "Google ad was very good. Value proposition was dead on, and they told their story extremely well.”

Media critic Jeff Jarvis was nonplussed. “Disappointed Google didn’t make a new commercial appropriate to the Super Bowl. France? Football? Google?”

But one YouTube commenter was undoubtedly what Google had been hoping for. “ahhh was watching the superbowl (coincidentally as an American girl in Paris ) and this made me cry!!” said gabriellpomay. “Best ad of the whole superbowl!”