Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad | Hacker News Reader

Google's Parisian Love Superbowl Ad

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120 pointsspencerfry107 comments

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 consumer perception of the product are more important than the product itself. Those companies products don't do enough to differentiate themselves, so brand advertising has to do it.

This could be a sign that the search (really the information discovery) market is maturing and that product innovation will slow down as the major players focus all their attention on marketing and battling for market share. I hope not. While Google Search is good, it's nowhere near good enough yet.

"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 the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.

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.

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.

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?

If you have only one type of chip then it would be very hard to tell, but if you advertise for Doritos and Doritos sales spike 4x as much as your 10 other brands that weren't being advertised it's not hard to do the math.

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)

"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.

At one time, I was the CIO for a nation-wide retail chain. All of our systems were real-time and we had the ability to see sales as they happened.

A lot of companies use local servers in store locations that dial home and upload data nightly. In the brick retail environment, that's pretty close to real-time.

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, see rule #1.

When you think about the tiny margins grocery stores survive on (1% is the commonly quoted stat), it's easy to see that they're forced to be well run. Make many mistakes and they're out of business.

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.

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.

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.

Any book on Walmart will talk about their IT systems. Their main operations room looks like NASA's mission control. I recall that Walmart can redirect trucks on the road via satellite to different stores whenever demand suddenly fluctuates.

Bing being merely as good as Google means the Bing team haven't done enough. That means they have to compete on brand, and that's really hard since Google has a stronger brand. Yahoo's search results have been on par with Google for most people's purposes for a while, but that hasn't helped them.

To compete with Google on search you have to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista: be noticeably better, consistently. As you said, Google is nowhere near good enough yet.

So this is what Google is scared of, and that's why it's in their best interest to keep innovating, because otherwise someone somewhere might beat them to the next real breakthrough.

Bing so far has failed by not making any real technical progress, and only reaching parity. That means right now they have to compete on brand, and that sucks for them.

Exactly! Thank Cthulhu for competition.

It sucks for Google too. The very last thing they want is the commoditization of search. Resisting brand advertising is likely a result of wanting to limit the perception of being a commodity. They'd MUCH rather have the perception that they don't need to compete on brand, that they're technically much better than everyone else.

The fact that they're doing lifestyle branding is actually a pretty bad sign. It means they feel Bing represents a real threat.

Lucky for Google, Microsoft sucks at advertising. Imagine if they had to compete with someone who was as good at lifestyle branding as Coca-Cola.

Tell us why you think Bing is as good as Google.

Bing had my site indexed 4 days before google, and updates it more regularly! That's about all I can think of

Bing is definitely faster and more regular on new sites. Seen it time and again. But I don't know if that matters in the end. Certainly not as much as update speed on the major sites, where Google is very good.

Pretty anecdotal. In that vein, I definitely see far more google IPs in my app logs when they are new and have no traffic. When I see traffic that isn't someone with a beta invite or some bot trying to find a PHP exploit, it's pretty much always google.

In fact, I just checked on two sites right now and I'm seeing 66.249.67.152, 66.249.67.49 and 66.249.68.123, all of which are googlebot. I see one yahoo IP (67.195.111.167) and nothing from msn or bing.

I went back and looked, and on my three newest sites, Bing was first by several days. Oddly, Yahoo is my most frequent on those. Not the case with older sites.

Maybe it's more random that I would have imagined.

The Bing iPhone app has awesome support for movie times and locations. The Google iPhone app is a collection of annoying pop-out-to-safari links.

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, getting stressed and trying out Bing. Where... well, they don't actually search. They just stare at a background image of a Japanese garden or something, and we're apparently supposed to assume that this makes everything better. Again we don't see how Bing's search results are of benefit to a user, and the message here seems to be that Bing is all style and no substance.

Contrast with Google's Super Bowl spot: it consists entirely of showing someone using Google, and presents a coherent narrative of how Google search results are having a positive effect on the user's (off-screen) life. Best of all, the narrative it presents is a cute love story.

This is sort of like the contrast between the "iDon't" spots and Apple's own iPhone ads; the Droid spots all focused on bashing the iPhone to the exclusion of showing what was good about the Droid, while the iPhone spots just... showed how useful an iPhone is.

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.

We're both speaking in anecdotes, but this hasn't been my experience. I had my search box in Firefox set to Bing for several weeks, until it was just too annoying to re-do so many searches in Google and getting better results. For what it's worth, most of those searches tended to be technical questions, not local searches like you describe, but in my experience those are adequete on Google as well, and if something comes up incorrect my first backup is usually Yelp and not Bing.

I have quite a bit of loyalty to Google. I use them for RSS, Email, Calendar, Documents, mobile alerts, maps and phone service among other things.

I have no doubt that Google will improve and adjust to any threats Bing might one day bring. The cost of me moving all of my data and changing habits to another place would be high. That and there is no way in hell I'd trust Microsoft with my data.

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.

Now we are seeing Google ads. So I guess Google is starting to get worried about competition, and the ease of switching search engines.

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.

Google search share is 65.7% according to ComScore. Pretty dominant, but nowhere near 95%.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/c...

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.

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...

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.

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.

Beautifully executed. The music was just right. Did a great job of showcasing the features that they have added to search (especially translations and flight status).

It was such a stark contrast the other ads, really shows how well Google knows themselves. We find you information, and we make it incredibly simple.

I totally agree. It is amazing how much emotion music can add to something as everyday as google searches!

The Batman one was awesome. Too bad I can't find it anywhere. It was hilarious.

CBS has all of the ads at cbs.com.

In addition to building up the Google brand, this ad introduces many viewers to uses of Google they weren't aware of (finding how-to's and advice, tracking flights, translating phrases, etc). Remember, a large number of people still don't realize you can use Google for more than simple keyword searches:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8hthy/anybody_els...

Yes! I'm surprised that more people haven't commented on this.

I believe this is the main reason why they even considered running an ad. Most of the examples are contrived to show off little-known but useful Google features. Why else is she in Paris?

Otherwise, the ad is largely celebrating how Google has entered almost every part of our lives. It doesn't really tell us anything we don't know, just associates it with pure gushy sentiment. I guess that's the branding part.

This ad caused more than one girl at our superbowl party to exclaim "OMG I'm going to cry!" By that measure, I think it was quite effective.

I think this ad absolutely exemplifies why Google so utterly dominate almost everything they turn their hand to. The ad is utterly simple, to the point that there is practically nothing to subtract; This elegance of form reveals the magic of the substance.

Compare to recent ads by Yahoo and Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqbaZcX67L0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2OXiX5esE

The ad by Yahoo is particularly poor, but they both make the same mistake - lots going on, but very little content. They're dancing around the subject, almost as if they're ashamed to talk about their product. Lots of glittering generalities, but no specifics. The ads could be for any old crap. They are the crudest of branding exercises - show vaguely positive images and slap your name on them.

The Google ad takes a simple narrative and uses it to show you their product and what it can do for you. They don't talk about wonder and joy and 'bringing people together', they just get on with making it happen. Google say "This is our product. We think it is magical and wonderful and profound. We credit you with the intelligence to come to your own conclusions.".

Google know that their product is so powerful and elegant that it needs no explaining. They understand the implications of their technology on a deep and fundamental level. They can talk about search so beautifully as to make people cry. That is as great a commercial advantage as I can possibly imagine.

Dude, did you see the Chrome ads? A lot of them were terrible.

You're right that this piece did achieve "Googliness" in an ad context. Maybe they've found their message finally.

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 didn't notice? http://www.hulu.com/adzone/watch#50032769

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!

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.

I do it to keep track of my position when I scroll a document.

Nervous habit, really.

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.

When I'm reading something it helps me find my place again if I get interrupted or need to look up something in a different browser tab. It also makes text more readable when sites do odd things like put medium gray text on a light gray background (for instance HN comments with a score < 1).

Do users still highlight when using a trackpad instead of a mouse?

I do. I tend to double or triple click to highlight the word or paragraph I'm reading. It's more of a fidgety thing than the need to track what I'm reading.

Side note: Any website that uses a double click on a word to launch a webpage defining the word or a search of their website with that word is EVIL and needs to be wiped off the face of the internet permanently. New York Times, I'm looking at you. (Besides, on a Mac I can right click and choose Look Up in Dictionary or Search in Google)

I was surprised the ad didn't end with the person clicking on "I'm feeling lucky".

That was my first comment as the ad ended.

I think that is because of reproducibility. People are bound to repeat the searches in the ad and they will usually turn up sufficiently similar results to make them think "it works". On the other hand, "I'm feeling lucky" is much less likely to yield the same result.

Cheesy, but cute, and not nearly so misogynistic as what seems to be the norm this year.

The rest of the ad campaign: http://www.youtube.com/searchstories

Eric Schmidt has posted to the Official Google Blog regarding the Ad...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/love-and-super-bowl.h...

Probably the least expensive super bowl ad too, fyi

screencasts <3

For super bowl ads, I would imagine that the actual production cost is almost a rounding error compared to the cost of the airtime itself.

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.

Shut up geek, can't you see this imaginary couple is in love?

I think you touch on another unstated reason for this ad. You could see it in the Youtube comments... people were saying things like "yeah, Google will take over the world, but when they do I will be cheering it on... they're awesome".

People are clearly struggling with this increasing unease they have about Google and online services while embracing them more and more every day. This ad helps them get in touch with their positive feelings. Which is not exactly a lie, but it serves Google's interests.

I did. From that perspective (my life seen through the lens of Google's information on me) I found the music pretty creepy, too.

It reminded me of http://www.fatal-attarction.net/dl/DuBistTerrorist_EN_deubbe...

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

I am not a fan of Google at all, and even I must admit the ad was pretty good. I'm interested in what's behind this reversal, though. I read that Larry and Sergey had previously vetoed any kind of Super Bowl advertising. I think albertsun and others here are right -- Bing is now a serious competitor.

Just noticed that the version posted on Hulu has a flight from Delta Airlines come up in search. The one posted here has a flight from American Airlines. Seems that Google put some effort into remaining airline neutral.

The YouTube one is older... so maybe Delta partnered with Google for a product placement? The Super Bowl version is a bigger deal than the YouTube one after all.

The one I saw broadcast during the game was a Delta flight, not AA.

It's way more likely that the results that came up for the AA flight were not exactly what was requested (although 100% what I'd want to see if I was searching for one of the other items on the page).

Posted for no reason whatsoever. The greatest marriage-related ad ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97X9huy7pHQ

I'm wondering what made them go with this oversimplified ad rather than one of their other glorified ones such as this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC8ogWwZxwQ

Probably because the ad you linked is ... a lot more confusing than the other one. It's very fast-paced and shows a lot of various products, which to the average person watching the SuperBowl might be a bit much. The ad they aired showed not only how simple Google is, but also how powerful it is. I think it was a great mix.

Copy with HTML5 version (for those of us living in the future): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et_BFRbgoSs

I'm surprised they advertised search, and not, say, the Nexus One or any of their newer products. Still, definitely one of the best commercials I've seen.

Search is where they make their dough.

Yep, but at this point, Google is literally synonymous with search. Android, however is still much less recognizable than the iPhone. Then again, marketing to that many people is something of a science, and I admit to not understanding it well.

Google may be synonymous with search. However, huge portions of the population have not integrated search into their lives as tightly as you and I have (Google says I've done 19k searches and averaged about 550 a month last year -- I rather doubt my typical customer has). Evangelizing search to the rest of the population makes Google serious amounts of money -- that is one reason they've been dumping a lot into advertising search as a desired behavior this year (in Japan at least).

Both the US and Japan are rich countries with ubiquitous net access and mature Internet markets, right? What do you think was the growth in the number of searches last year for each country? Pick a percentage.

Here's the real numbers: http://bit.ly/aFdenY (I used bit.ly only because the URL gives away the surprise.)

I don't think we're anywhere near Peak Search, either. (For example, I'm seeing YOY growth in the 50% region on some very popular queries for non-techie customers like, e.g., [halloween bingo cards].)

Thanks for that link. That's a huge change for 2009! I believe that hanging around tech people gives one the false impression that Google has saturated the search market.

One thing to consider: Google has a market share of 38% in Japan vs 72% in the U.S. http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Plan...

If you "read between the lines" you can see that they didn't advertise search, the advertised the Google brand. The search theme was just a means to deliver the message that the Google brand is an important part of our everyday life (as in this example, Google accompanies the protagonist through his Parisian romance).

If Google does a Super Bowl ad next year, what about using AdSense in the commercial? This way they can offset the cost by providing an ad within an ad.

This was the one ad I saw tonight where I didn't feel like I'd been given the brown acid by a bunch of desperate ad agency creatives.

Nice one, Google.

Seemed like a first draft ad to me. Seriously, that was an afternoon of work.

It seems appropriate. Google is all about minimalism in design.

Isn't that the beauty of it though?

How would you improve this ad with more time? It seemed fairly well polished, for a simple premise.

Do you as an English-only speaker, really want to marry and have kids with a French-only speaking woman when you don't even know how to say "you are cute" in French?

So the premise seems a little dumb.

I'm assuming the searches happened over a longer period of time than those 52 seconds.

"But love is blind and lovers cannot see."

- Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice

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...)

There's also Translated Search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=clir:1&...

Thanks guys, I'm aware of my options. :P

I wonder if there's been a noticeable spike in search terms related to that ad, e.g. people searching for how to say "you are cute" in French.

Not noticeable enough to show up on Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X

Though everything else related to the Superbowl has managed to show up. People continue to be enamored of The Who, and the Call Barney Stinson guy seems to have gotten his money's worth.

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

Depends on how cute she is...

And of course, the ad shows the limitations of Google Translate: "you are cute" was translated to "you are a cute [man]", which would be something really weird to say to a girl... Since there is no gender information in the English original, it wasn't that easy to figure out that the cute person is female... although most humans would have known.

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