Google wouldn't have run their ad if it wasn't for statistics | Hacker News Reader

Google wouldn't have run their ad if it wasn't for statistics

blogs.zdnet.com

13 pointstokenadult12 comments

The commercial is about Google positioning itself against a growing Bing brand. Bing commercials often make fun of the numerous and nonsensical results from other search engines (i.e., Google). Notice the commercial had perfect answers at the top of each result set. As Bing hits the media hard, I expect to see more commercials from Google.

Overall, a good execution by Google on its first commercial. Putting it on the Super Bowl, all I can think is, "Go big or go home."

This explains why the flight status # changed from previous runnings of this ad (which had unrelated results in the top three). I was curious why they'd go so far out of the way, but this makes sense. [See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109079]

Can we agree that it (according to the depth of the article) that this decision wasn't made based on statistical analysis, but rather just ratings? "ohhh... a bunch of people judged our video and liked it! Statistically we can't NOT do it!"

Please stop attributing everything "scientists" do as hyper-analytical. It's not like the analysis they did was more complex than what takes place in any focus group - it was just scaled by a few orders of magnitude.

Was it a success? Yes. Was it a success because of statistical analysis? No. It was a success because it was a good fucking ad.

Those don't seem like quite the right statistics, though. The main risk is whether something that gets good reactions on YouTube will: 1) get good reactions from a superbowl TV audience; and 2) actually drive enough traffic to the company to be worth the cost. Just the YouTube viewer data doesn't answer either of those questions. (They might have had other statistics on that, of course, but if so, they haven't shared them.)

What’s a Super Bowl audience? Doesn’t everyone watch? I’m from Europe, so please forgive my ignorance, but it would be pretty absurd to claim there is a World Cup final audience. I don’t know why that should be any different with the Super Bowl. Skewed a bit, sure, but practically everyone watches.

Isn’t that what makes those ads so expensive in the first place?

I also would think that Google has pretty good data on who watches what on YouTube and would like to add that ads must not always be about traffic but can also be about branding.

In my experience those who watch tend to think that everyone watches, when merely a lot of people watch. I never watch it, and would be hard pressed to name an athlete or even the teams involved.

i've never seen the super bowl, and i have a few friends who "watch the superbowl" at a get together that involves more go (board game) and cooking than tv watching.

there are few things that "everyone" does, especially when you generalize across a huge country with numerous cultural imports.

I didn’t want to imply that literally everyone watches. But the ratings are pretty impressive and don’t seem to be limited to one or other specific group.

Agreeing with your post, here we are discussing an advertisement televised during the Super Bowl. You said "practically everyone" watches, and PRACTICALLY, I think you are right. No other ad placement results in more free pass-through of the ad message.

I can't decide if google's love of data and statistics is a good thing, or a bad thing.

Looks at google stock price and earnings reports Hmm. Seems like a good thing.

This commercial was 100% about branding - the structure, music, content etc was designed to build relationship.

The right thing to measure here would be user attrition.

Why not just use http://www.ixquick.com/ and be done with it?

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