What Chrome TV Spots Say About Google Ad Strategy
A posting last Friday on the Google blog didn't say much beyond that Google was continuing to try to raise awareness of Chrome, but its authors did suggest that it was an experiment.
"We talked to our Google TV Ads team to see how we could show the video that our Japan team developed to a wider audience in a measurable way," wrote Mike Steib, Google's TV Ads director, and Anna-Christina Douglas from the Google chrome team, on the Google blog. "Using some of the results from our placement-targeted ads on the Google Content Network, we designed a Google TV Ads campaign, which we hope will raise awareness of our browser, and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns."
Has Google learned a little something from some of its uncharacteristically failing advertising ventures? Google's ad outlets have been in the news quite a bit lately, especially after Google said earlier this year it would divest itself of most radio and print advertising, shutting down its Google Audio Ads and Google Print Ads divisions.
On the radio side, in particular, Google stumbled, and it will be out of radio ads completely on May 31, not three years after Chad Steelberg -- one of the consultants Google teamed with in 2006 to broaden its radio reach -- proclaimed, "Google is going to conquer radio."
A Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journalattempted to assess what went wrong with Google's radio strategy, settling on Google having "misjudged the capacity of its technology to work beyond the Web, and underestimated the human side of the business."
"With an enormous data corpus, our computers can do the math really well," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a Journal interview. "But in the audio case, there wasn't a good signal back to us about which ads performed."
Google's move to a more traditional TV spot to hype Google Chrome might be a signal of Google trying to understand that "human side" -- that is, that spotlighting Chrome on television would reach a segment of potential customers who wouldn't catch Google Chrome's YouTube spots or notice its plugs on Google's main search page.
If anything, Google might need a less subtle TV push to make its Chrome ads stand out further: the TV spot, as it stands, features a tray of building blocks rearranged to look like a browser window, but without explicit mention of what Google Chrome is or even the Google logo until right at the end.
We'll be interested to see what it brings back from the drawing board on Google Chrome next. Leave a comment below and tell us what Google needs to do to turn Chrome into a viable browser competitor.