Video: YouTube
If you liked Google's "Parisian Love" commercial during the Super Bowl you'll probably also enjoy the six other "Search Stories" the company has released over the past couple of months.
While most of Sunday's Super Bowl ads took carefully crafted aim at viewers' funny bone or stomach (frequently both), during the third quarter Google chose to disarm fans with thirty seconds of unabashed sentimentality. Like a starkly unique magazine cover that pops off a newsstand rack, Google's "Parisian Love" commercial was, in my view, neither overly testosteroned nor misogynistic, which set Google apart from the competition.
As if it needed to.
With Google's share of the Web search market at around eighty-five percent in January, the company really didn't need to run a commercial. (Maybe Yahoo, the distant runner up, or Microsoft, which hopes its Bing search engine will overtake Google, should have forked over the estimated $3 mil.) But Google's marketing is cut from the same cloth as Apple's. Both realize the phenomenal power of understatement and emotion in a noisy, impersonal marketplace.
Despite Google's massive wealth, size, and geopolitical influence—and the wariness those instill in consumer reporters—its prevailing public image (Steve Jobs's recent reported comments notwithstanding) is as unassuming and American as apple pie. The only other company I can think of being so approachably megalomaniacal is Hank Scorpio's.
Skeptics (who I will probaby hear from) see Google's heart-string-plucking as a tactic to lull you into false sense of trust and security. They might be right, although I really did like "High School."—Nick K. Mandle
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