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Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

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Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#91

Post by fab13n »

albertsun wrote: post #15

Great commercial, but the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right. The quality of other search engines has caught up to the point where brand is an important factor in the fight for search market share. Google's product is no longer clearly better than the alternatives. Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and…

Great analysis; however, I'm not sure it's a brand-building ad.

It sums up to "Google was at the heart of all the good things that happened to that guy, and it unobtrusively helped it to happen right". That's more of a "we really are not evil" thing, to balance Eric Schmidt's screw-up on privacy, or Jobs' and Balmer's attacks, IMO.

Google has kept an amazing amount of public sympathy, given their hegemony on the web, and there are now threats that it might change. Microsoft's hegemony is based on corporate customers (the Windows/Office 22 catch), who don't care about their partners' ethics or image. Google's success is based on the public, it can be jeopardized by the loss of public support.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#92

Post by endtime »

patio11 wrote: post #53
endtime wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they have sales data from before the ad ran, and then they get sales data from after the ad ran. It's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but if the ad has an impact (or doesn't) they'll be able to tell.

Or you run the ad in some markets, don't run it in other markets, and watch the relative numbers. A/B testing: not just for Internet micro-businesses and Google.

Well, yes, but I am pretty sure everyone sees the same Superbowl ads.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#93

Post by [deleted] »

heyitsnick wrote: post #26
Alex3917 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and consumer perception of the product are more important than the product itself." Interestingly enough, the reason those companies buy all those ads is that enough Americans go to the store to buy more beer/chips during halftime that the ads actually pay for themselves before the end of the game. IIRC th…

"IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.", can you provide any further information or links on this? Shocking if true, and my quick google searching was fruitless.

[deleted]

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#94

Post by davidw »

sketerpot wrote: post #41
n8agrin wrote: post #28

A minor observation, but I appreciate how they show the user highlighting text in one of their search results for truffles. Having done some usability work and watched users work on their computers, highlighting what is being read is such a common behavior, it's cool to see Google so in touch.

People really do that? I had no idea. Why do they highlight what's being read? I'm confused and intrigued.

It's the 21st century equivalent of tracing your place on the page with your finger as you silently mouth the words.

Kidding:-) I had a boss who was always highlighting stuff back and forth, and it definitely seems to be some sort of nervous habit more than anything.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#95

Post by gaius »

nzmsv wrote: post #56
albertsun wrote: post #15

Great commercial, but the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right. The quality of other search engines has caught up to the point where brand is an important factor in the fight for search market share. Google's product is no longer clearly better than the alternatives. Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and…

From pg's article ( http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html ): ...have you ever seen a Google ad? Something is going on here. Admittedly, Google is an extreme case. It's very easy for people to switch to a new search engine. It costs little effort and no money to try a new one, and it's easy to see if the results are better. And so Google doesn't have to advertise. In a business like theirs, being the best is enough. N…

Google are advertising everywhere in London. You can't get on a Tube without seeing a billboard-sized ad for Chrome on the platform. They take out ads in the freesheets too. This has been going on for several months now.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#96

Post by gaius »

arethuza wrote: post #83
lmkg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. Google feels a need to respond to Bing, which it hasn't before. However stupid you may think the ads are, Google is responding as if Bing is a (potentially) legitimate threat.

Of course it is a legitimate threat - if Bing started doing searches in any consistently better way than Google I'd use that. I have about as much loyalty to Google as a service as I did to Altavista: i.e. practically none. I suspect others think this way and Google knows it.

Google's index is increasingly polluted. Let me give you an example, the other day I needed the exact address of an electronics store, I entered the name of the company and the street it was on. The top search results were "places to eat near..." - WTF? Who searches for places to eat near a named shop!? Similarly, if you search for "X review" you will mostly get pages that are just affiliate links to retailers and the text "Be the first to write a review of X!"

Right now Bing is a better search engine even if the only reason is that fewer people are trying to game it. The thing that makes Google most useful is searching other people's sites (e.g. adding +site:news.bbc.co.uk to your search terms). As a standalone service, they're going the way Altavista went.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#97

Post by llimllib »

nostrademons wrote: post #36
llimllib wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would they be able to distinguish between a sale due to an ad and one that's not? Or are you merely saying that "these companies" (like CareerBuilder? or do you just mean Coke, Bud Light, and Doritos?) have so much revenue that merely Super Bowl Sunday pays for the ads?

You look for the change in sale rates before the ad and after it. If there's a big discontinuity right when the ad ran, it's not a fair assumption that it was because of the ad.

but the big discontinuity could be caused by the frikkin super bowl. You know, the one where everybody buys chips and soda and beer.

(This is actually a bit unfair of me; my brother makes models to analyze the effectiveness of ads for Nielsen, so I know a bit about how difficult it is to figure out)

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#98

Post by llimllib »

endtime wrote: post #34
llimllib wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would they be able to distinguish between a sale due to an ad and one that's not? Or are you merely saying that "these companies" (like CareerBuilder? or do you just mean Coke, Bud Light, and Doritos?) have so much revenue that merely Super Bowl Sunday pays for the ads?

Well, they have sales data from before the ad ran, and then they get sales data from after the ad ran. It's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but if the ad has an impact (or doesn't) they'll be able to tell.

It's so far from a perfectly controlled experiment as to be useless. You have sales before the ad ran (when it wasn't the super bowl), and you have sales after (when it was the super bowl). That's a huge confounding factor; everybody buys chips, soda and beer on Super Bowl Sunday.

They're not able to tell right away. They pay people like Nielsen millions of dollars to analyze the effectiveness of their ads at super bowl time. Those folks do regression analysis of the sales figures compared to previous years, with the knowledge of how sales in general have been, sprinkle with some bullshit so that the client will hear what they want to hear, and then deliver them back to the companies that ran the ads. (My brother does this job).

My point: they don't really know, and it's not at all easy to know.

edit @jonknee since HN won't let me reply: Except that you're advertising Doritos more than those other brands. How much of that purchase effect spike is due to your other advertisements, how much is due to super bowl ads, and how much is due to people simply feeling like Doritos are an appropriate super bowl snack?

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#100

Post by mattmanser »

gaius wrote: post #95
nzmsv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From pg's article ( http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html ): ...have you ever seen a Google ad? Something is going on here. Admittedly, Google is an extreme case. It's very easy for people to switch to a new search engine. It costs little effort and no money to try a new one, and it's easy to see if the results are better. And so Google doesn't have to advertise. In a business like theirs, being the best is enough. N…

Google are advertising everywhere in London. You can't get on a Tube without seeing a billboard-sized ad for Chrome on the platform. They take out ads in the freesheets too. This has been going on for several months now.

Google Chrome and Google Search are totally different products, pg was talking about search, so this comment is a bit irrelevant. Chrome is advertising everywhere (even the town where I was born which is in the sticks!).

On a totally unrelated note to this point, watching that video made me feel uncomfortable because that's not how I use search. I always highlight, right-click, choose search Google. Watching someone else do it differently made me feel a little odd...

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