Updated: Google to Air “Search Stories” Ad During Super Bowl...
In that post, I noted “It's truly a brand campaign: Google is not selling anything here other than its own brand …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Search Stories format has been circulating online for the better part of a year — John Battelle flagged the search-narrative videos back in his March 2009 Seen In the Wild post — so the news here is less the creative than the venue: Google putting a pure brand spot, selling nothing but itself, into the most expensive advertising slot in American television. It closes a loop that started when Google first experimented with buying TV ad inventory in late 2005, then a side business rather than a self-promotion channel.
Timing sharpens the story. In the same week Google disclosed it had been targeted in the Operation Aurora hack, was reported (unconfirmed) to be finalizing an NSA partnership on security, and expanded its Washington lobbying operation, it chose to introduce its warmest, most human face — searches telling love stories — to a hundred-million-person audience.
First-order effects
- Google's brand, previously carried almost entirely by word of mouth and product utility, now competes directly in the brand-image arena alongside the consumer giants that have long treated the Super Bowl as their flagship buy.
- YouTube gets marquee mainstream exposure: the campaign lives on Google's own video property, and the company's blog presence around the spot pushes Super Bowl audiences toward it.
Second-order effects
- Broadcast inventory sellers gain a new category of buyer — internet firms that historically spent nothing on mass brand media — and every large web brand now faces the question of whether staying off television cedes image-making to competitors who buy in.
- Agencies and production houses built for emotional narrative work, not performance metrics, suddenly have a pitch opening against engineering-led marketing cultures like Google's.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the old division of labor — tech companies doing direct-response marketing while consumer brands buy emotion — erodes, pushing the ad industry toward hybrid shops that can serve both, and raising the odds that regulators and analysts begin treating Google's growing marketing apparatus as part of how it shapes public perception.
The trend: Internet companies that scaled for a decade without consumer advertising are starting to buy mass-media brand campaigns, and Google's Super Bowl spot is the clearest signal yet of that migration.