Google’s Brilliant Super Bowl Ad

I’m taking this opportunity to write my first blog post in many months.  I guess I’ve not had much to say (at least not that anyone would find interesting anyway).

I’m one of a handful of Americans that did not watch the Super Bowl yesterday. But one of ads from the game caught my attention even before it aired..

Google had he most brilliant (yet simp0le and heartwarming) ad of all. 

I first heard about it by accident the day before the game and decided to check it out.

It turns out it’s an ad that was first Internet-only and had been up since November as part of Google’s Internet Only marketing campaign known as “Search Stories”.

I must have watched the ad 20 times by now. I’m a sucker for romance, what can I say (yes I’ve been known to watch chick flicks and like it)?

It actually made me cry.

Romance aside though, it does a great job of demonstrating what that little search box can do.  I’ll be a lot of people who watched had no idea that they could use Google to quickly translate, get flight arrival/departure information or it’s use it a a combined Yellow Page/mapping function (and all from the home page).

Overall a very effective ad. 

Tom Maurstad of The Dallas Morning News summed it up best when he named it the best of the Super bowl and wrote:

….No flash, no special effects, just a love story told (and told really well) through a procession of search questions, The arc from the unentangled beginning (student questions about programs in France) to the final "how to assemble a crib" is just beautifully, sweetly done. It deepens your appreciation of the Google brand and what it does. You know, like advertising is supposed to and Super Bowl ads almost never do.

Anyway, enough already. As of this writing, I’ve been gushing about it for hours.