The Google Chrome advertisement at the Westfield Shopping Centre
If you have been in the UK in the last 6 months, you must have noticed at least once an advertisement about Chrome, Google‘s newest browser for surfing the web. Google announced its own browser and released the beta version for Windows in 2008. It was only recently that it completed the MacOS X and Linux versions, making it a unique browser that can run in the most popular operating systems. Therefore, the time was ripe to follow the release with an extensive media advertising campaign.
Attempting to enter this specific section of the market is not an easy task. Until recently, the public did not have many choices on internet browsers, and with the demise of Netscape, Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer dominated the market. Today, even though Internet Explorer has a large proportion of the market, Firefox, a new internet browser from the Mozilla foundation, has gained widespread acceptance and has begun crunching Microsoft’s domination. Apple also released its Safari browser for Windows, and Google then followed suit with Google Chrome and the intention to build it for all the popular computer platforms. To gain a large percentage of the market, the advertising campaign for Google Chrome needed to focus on to the simple user and explain how their surfing-the-net experience can be better and user-friendly. To this end, Google’s campaign has been immensely successful, because of:
Being everywhere. In the past 6 months, everywhere you looked, you could spot a Google Chrome advertisement. They were in tube stations, in posters, in train carriages, on the press, in London buses and also on the cover pages of most free-press magazines (and sometimes suited to the audience of the particular magazine). They even made special custom-made ads, like the ones I witnessed at the Westfield Shopping Centre. In one of the entrances of the shopping centre, there were special projections on Westfield’s wall, featuring Christmas -related themes and advertising Google Chrome.
Another Google Chrome advertisement at the Westfield Shopping Centre
Being simple. Launching a new computer software for surfing the web usually involves complex statements about HTML, CSSS, mpegs, Flash etc. But those words were never included in the Chrome’s advertisement copy, which, written in a relaxed playful font, included simple statements about what the normally doing when surfing the web.
Being unconventional. You would expect to find people fiddling with their computers in a normal advertisement about computer browsers, right? This is what happened with the Chrome feature’s advertisements, but in an unconventional way. As you can see from the video, Google chose to demonstrated the advanced features of Google Chrome not in a digital way, but in a mechanical old fashioned way. Under the slow and relaxing sounds of a harp, Google described the features of Google Chrome by building mechanical contraptions and offering some behind-the-scenes insights of how these worked to deliver the image in front of the camera. The viewer can’t just wait to see what they will come up with next.
Simply inspiring, isn’t it?
Lambda.
Lambda Phage 