Interesting background, I didn't realize Creative Lab worked on that campaign. It's certainly an improvement on Google's usual branding efforts and I totally agree that that's a better direction, but I think it still misses the mark in some ways. They want to pull on your heart strings, and yet the whole time you are stuck staring at a browser window. If the message was supposed to be human-centered rather than the Droid-style technology-centered, like "Your life is what's important, Google can help you", why did they stick the technology in your face for 100% of the time? Instead of showing the human side, it's almost like they unintentionally made an ad about fear of technology: you spend all your time staring at a screen missing real life. Who knows, maybe this is Creative Labs opinion of Google's culture.

This is unlike Apple's FaceTime ads, which also play on the same emotions, but that ad succeeds because it's set inside the human world. Facebook tried something similar with Places (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfX_ZQag1BM), trying to connect the technology with very strong emotions, nostalgia, etc. They did show a lot of real life scenes, but I think it also failed. They're selling the idea that Places helps you have serendipitous meetings with your "facebook friends", i.e. casual acquaintances you generally don't share those kinds of strong emotions with. It's completely incongruous for Facebook to try to brand itself around what are fairly private emotions that you usually reserve for only your most intimate relationships, especially after basically forcing everyone into public mode and declaring privacy dead.