Feeling Good About Google

The company’s Super Bowl ad didn’t introduce a new feature or product. Could it have been an exercise in damage control?

While watching Google’s first ever TV ad during the Super Bowl on Sunday, there was a moment when I thought, “Oh dear, I’m watching the beginning of the end.”

I’ve always been skeptical of the utility of TV ads. You would have to be doing some pretty sophisticated tracking to measure any changes in the perception of your brand, and even if you did manage to do that, trying to connect it back to a specific TV spot is impossible. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it as management guru Peter Drucker would say.

I’ve worked at tech companies that have spent a fortune on TV ads and I always had the feeling that they were run largely out of fear. We did them because we had always done them and nobody had the guts to pull the plug on the tactic, even though no one could be sure they actually did something. I always assumed that if we were starting fresh, the ads would never have happened.

Then Google comes out with a TV ad – and at the Super Bowl no less. Why did they do it? Was it to reach some part of the population that’s never heard of them? Unlikely – this is the U.S. market we’re talking about. Was it to show off a new feature? Nope – the only thing the ad showed off was the tried and true search function. Was it to launch a new product? Nope again. So what was the point?

The ad, in a word, was sweet. It was a love story designed to have you reaching for a tissue by the end. And people loved it because, seriously, what’s not to love about that? There was no ego. There was no sales pitch listing each feature of the new Google phone. The entire point of this ad was to make you feel good. And by that I mean make you feel good about Google.

Now here’s the part where I start to worry. If everyone already felt good about Google, why try to shore up that image? What’s going on with their public image that pushed them to run this ad? A cynical person might start wondering if the news coming from Google lately – employee departures, slowing growth, the fact that nobody likes Google Wave, their pullout from China – isn’t starting to make the folks on the inside worry a bit. Could this ad be a reaction to that?

Then again, maybe they’re just being proactive. Maybe they look at Apple and think, nobody seems to mind it when Apple does things like lock all of your content in a proprietary format or offer a mobile platform where it controls which applications will or will not be available to run on it. Maybe they figure we love Apple for the ads. Heck, maybe we do. If nothing else, Google’s ad certainly got us all talking.

As for me, I already use Google search, and as much as I liked the ad, it’s not going to change my behaviour in any way. Nor does it make me think Google is a nicer company because of it. It does make me want to go to Paris though. Maybe I’ll Google some flights right now.