Converge Weekly

Americans watching the Super Bowl may have been surprised to find a love story tucked into the third quarter. But then, Google is full of surprises, and the search engine giant struck again Sunday night when aired its first Super Bowl ad, a $2.5 million, 30-second “Parisian Love” story that unfolded from endearing Google searches, from “How to impress a French girl,” to “How to assemble a crib.

Media insiders found Google’s decision to enter into the famously competitive arena of Super Bowl advertisements curious. While the company makes its billions by selling ads, it has historically shied away from promoting its own brand in traditional outlets like TV and magazines. 

In fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt once referred to advertising as, “The last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.” (Of course, the company is so ubiquitous that there’s probably no real need.)

The blogosphere hummed with hints of the ad over the weekend after Schmidt sent this tweet Saturday: “Can’t wait to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”) Before the Super Bowl, tech blogger John Battelle said a Google Super Bowl ad “would be a true turning point for the brand — a brand that, for nearly ten years, dismissed brand advertising as a waste of money.” TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid noted the rumor with an equal amount of fanfare. “Hell has indeed frozen over,” he wrote, echoing Schmidt.

If “Parisian Love” felt familiar, it’s because it has been seen before, on YouTube, where Google has recently begun showing a series of videos called “Search Stories.”

Schmidt seemed a bit sensitive about the ad, and took to his blog to assure faithful Google searchers that the company “didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search.” Instead, he wrote, “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.”

The ad was rather endearing, and it added a dose of adorable to the Super Bowl’s traditionally testosterone-laden commercials.

Still, some say that the purpose of the Super Bowl blitz was clear: Google was on the offense.

The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Vascellaro posited that Google has begun the ad campaign “in partial response to Microsoft’s heavy marketing push around its new search engine Bing.” She said that while “Bing has mainly taken users from Yahoo’s search service so far,” the competition “has provoked Google to defend its turf.”

And at Wired, a technology site, John Abell said Google could use the positive publicity at the moment. “Even Google may also need a little jolt of positive buzz given its bold initiative to scan the world’s books and its high-profile threat to stop censoring search results in China,” he wrote.

Source: AOL News