Why does Google, the online empire that rewrites the rules on advertising, need to advertise on Super Bowl Sunday?
"Parisian Love", its TV ad which aired one time only during Super Bowl XLIV, is the story of a guy who finds school, home, girl, love, family and happiness ever after after a visit to Google.
The search giant earns billions from online advertising and owns 70 percent of the search market. Clearly, it doesn’t need to promote itself and until now was indifferent to Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s tens of millions of dollars on television and print adspend.
But considering the hoopla over Google’s plan to scan the world’s books and its threat to stop censoring search results in China, perhaps it was time for some good PR.
Moreover, Super Bowl XLIV boasted a global audience of one billion versus the ad’s 1.2 million hits on YouTube (prior to Super Bowl). In fact, since yesterday’s airing, the ad recorded another 800,000 or so views on YouTube. So the US$3 million price tag for the airtime was probably worth it.
Google didn’t even have to make “Parisian Love” from scratch. It has been on YouTube since November 2009. Besides, given the simple narrative, the lack of a cast, or even a production crew–only music design shop Analogue Muse has received credit so far–the production cost was probably a small fraction of one of Dorito’s homemade movies.
“We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt blogged. "Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience."
