A romance in search: Google’s Super Bowl ad

Yesterday Google, the advertising company that doesn’t advertise, made its debut on television by advertising during the Super Bowl breaks. The commercial is supposed to tell a Parisian love story in search:

If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you’ll have seen a video from Google called “Parisian Love”. In fact you might have watched it before, because it’s been on YouTube for over three months. We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.

More on Wired and the Google Blog

Disrupt the System

Didn’t make any 2010 resolutions myself, but I kinda liked this list I stumbled on:

  • Flip around your pronouns when storytelling, especially where they have been heavily gendered
  • When talking to someone who uses gendered pronouns, gently suggest they read the previous suggestion
  • Look people in the eye and smile at them as you walk by them
  • Diversify your examples
  • Call out sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or any other ‘minority group as stereotype’ jokes, references, slurs or language
  • Don’t buy products from companies that offend you or treat you badly
  • Take the time to talk with people with vastly different opinions
  • Take the time to get to know people with vastly different experiences of the world
  • Start taking people to task who talk about new media marketing in the same way Mad Men used old media marketing
  • Admit to your mistakes
  • Get to know your neighbours
  • Don’t take bribes
  • Leave product reviews
  • Demand your data
  • Use all the tools available to you to call out injustices and bad experiences

Happy 2010!

The inevitable end of Microsoft adCenter Analytics

Too bad, it had some nice visual and demographic features…

Microsoft adCenter Analytics

Dear Joris,

Last March, we announced the end of the adCenter Analytics beta program. We sent a reminder e-mail about the change last October.

This e-mail message is your final reminder that all hosted services, data collection, and technical support for adCenter Analytics will end on December 31, 2009. If you want to save your historical data, please use the export feature to download your reports before that date.

Microsoft adCenter e-mail support will also end on December 31. If you have not yet found an alternative web analytics solution, here is list of companies that offer comparable analytics solutions.
Thank you for your participation in the adCenter Analytics beta program. We appreciate your contribution.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Analytics Team

The Microsoft Analytics blog stays online and will now focus on advertising ROI and optimization.

The New Media douchebag

How to become a new media douchebag:

  1. Don’t do any real work.
  2. Talk, type, tag, text and Twitter about a lot of stuff. The greater the volume the better.
  3. Be sure to hate a lot of stuff and tell folks.
  4. Celebrate the other new media douchebags.

That’s all there is to it!

Congratz, you can now call yourself a new media douchebag ;-)


Kommon Kraft parody of Common Craft.