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Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

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Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#81

Post by andrewljohnson »

CamperBob wrote: post #67
heyitsnick wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

As crad suggests in his reply, never, ever make the mistake of thinking grocery-store chains are managed by knuckle-dragging morons. Grocery retailing is a hell of an interesting business. A grocery store is like a miniature, specialized Disneyland. Rule #1: everything you see, from shelf height to lighting to back-end IT, is intentional. Rule #2: in the event you see something that looks arbitrary or unimportant, se…

Never make the mistake of thinking this is equally true of all chains. Some chains, such as Giant Eagle, are known for their data mining. Others just follow the leader.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#82

Post by arethuza »

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…

I've seen quite of posters for Google Chrome, which struck me as a bit odd that a company that depends on high tech advertising would resort to such a low tech medium.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#83

Post by arethuza »

lmkg wrote: post #74
ubernostrum wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right Judging based on the ads, I wouldn't agree. Bing's TV spots fall into two groups: 1. A litany of random obnoxiousness followed by some dude saying "BING". We don't see someone getting better results from Bing, we just see someone obnoxiously spouting crap and then associate that with the brand. Whoops. 2. People trying to answer a question,…

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.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#84

Post by yardie »

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.

When I worked for BestBuy the store had a mainframe. I thought to myself ,"what the hell do they need a mainframe for to run a store?" A region or a district I could understand, but most of the tasks for running a store could be done from a decent Windows box. I figured they bought a lot of them for cheap and needed for them to do something so printing SKUs twice a week was what they were good for.

When I got to university the guy that ran the IT department for Walmart gave a presentation on how they got real-time data on each store.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#85

Post by arethuza »

CamperBob wrote: post #67
heyitsnick wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

As crad suggests in his reply, never, ever make the mistake of thinking grocery-store chains are managed by knuckle-dragging morons. Grocery retailing is a hell of an interesting business. A grocery store is like a miniature, specialized Disneyland. Rule #1: everything you see, from shelf height to lighting to back-end IT, is intentional. Rule #2: in the event you see something that looks arbitrary or unimportant, se…

I don't know about the US (I suspect it will be the same) - but the chains in the UK compete with each other like a bunch of hyperintelligent velociraptors.

Quite good for customers though - in the (rather affluent) area where I live we have a Sainsburys, Waitrose and M&S food store and they are clearly locked in polite but vicious competition.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#86

Post by nostrademons »

timr wrote: post #66
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…

Maybe this is just what you do when you've got a lock on 95% of your market, and you're massively profitable. Defensive maneuvers make more sense when you're executing flawlessly on the offensive front, and you've got resources to spare.

I'm inclined to take Eric Schmidt's blog post on this at face value, i.e. Google had a YouTube video with an overwhelmingly positive response and $20B cash in the bank, so they figured they might as well run it as a SuperBowl ad.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#87

Post by treyp »

invisible wrote: post #52

Does anyone know why the flight number changed from this ad and the REAL one that aired during the superbowl (flight status of DL 8601 vs AA120)? It's also strange that the date stayed the same but the time changed. Perhaps it's because there are trivial results (see the "old" ad)? The old one has results for atlas sound and acrylic adhesive. I don't know why this point stood out to me - are there any other changes I…

yep, that definitely must be it.

if the reason they're advertising is to sell the brand, and it's a brand competition with Bing who claims Google has sometimes irrelevant search results, then of course they need the most relevant search results possible in this ad

even though the focus was on the flight status up top, the search results for sound parts are bad results. so i guess they switched it up in case anyone noticed that.

interesting find!

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#88

Post by zyb09 »

nroach wrote: post #61

Am I the only one that finds this ad kind of scary? 58 comments so far and not one mentions privacy. Google can tell a lot about a person from their search history, and this ad illustrates the point well.

The add totally backfired on me. It's like: "Look what we can know about you by just looking at your searches, haha!"

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#89

Post by lallysingh »

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…

Or it could be a sign that google recognizes that a good portion of the market doesn't care about search quality. It's not 1999 anymore, the web's gone fully commercial, and users are as easily swayed by branding as they are by product quality.

In my book, this was google refusing to lose customers to branding by meeting Microsoft move-for-move. Google's technical innovations are their technical response to MS.

Re: Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

#90

Post by die_sekte »

autarch wrote: post #33
jonny_noog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first met the German woman who is now my wife, she could barely speak a coherent English sentence, but we managed. Two weeks later we were a couple, a year later we were married. That was 7 years ago this month. I still don't know how to say "You are cute" in German.

Sheesh, try google! ( http://www.google.com/search?q=translate+you+are+cute+into+g... )

The result of this translation is quite a bit too formal. "Du bist süß" is less formal.
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