« The Toothy Yogi Boxed the Bearclaw with a Spork | Main | The Wow Is NOW, Mother******s! »

March 19, 2007

Gmail Gives You Wings?

This is definitely the first Google display ad I've ever seen; it must be some sort of mistake

Given the fact that the G-Unit is clocking along with a market cap in the rather exclusive neighborhood of $140 billion, with annual sales in the $12 billion range (and growing), and that those $12 billion (and thus, that $140 billion) are amassed in ten-cent increments that arrive only when people click on ads, you'd think that the folks at Google would be pretty talented at figuring out which sorts of ads are going to make people click.

Not that they have to worry about advertising, mind you. That they've built this juggernaut with little to no media spending says a lot about (a) how sweet their search engine is, (b) their genius in re: PR (in which they've achieved an Ipod-esque level of simpatico with the press and analyst community), and (c) the charm of their kooky name. Though we've never really seen an ad for Google, you'd be hard-pressed to find many folks here in the connected parts of the universe that don't know that the Google is good for looking for stuff on the Internets.

So you can imagine my surprise/ mild amusement when I opened up an article on Soccernet the other day and saw a 468x60 rotating .gif suggesting that I give Gmail a whirl because it was super good at keeping spam out of my inbox (I had heard this spam thing was a total pain in the behind):

A couple things here:

(1) I can confidently admit that I never expected to see my first Google ad (online or otherwise) on a random Soccernet article page;

(2) Of all the things that Google would be pushing with their first media campaign, I'm surprised it's something as banal as mail; I guess they need mail to pay the bills (more specifically: they need mail to get people to sign up for a Google account -- the better to increase their ad rates with exciting profile and behavioral targeting options!);

(3) This was actually a media buy for them -- not just a house ad on an AdSense placement (the referring URL was through Tribal Fusion). I wonder if it was maybe a UK-only thing that accidentally found me on Soccernet?

And now allow me to affix my snobby cap and critique the actual ad:

Really?

That's it?

The pitch is around spam and how Gmail will apparently eradicate it and turn people who send spam (perhaps you might call them "spammers"?) into hobo/ homeless dudes on some to-be-determined future date. This we know from the little stick-figure cartoon men who populate the opening frame of the ad. So fine, Gmail does a bang-up job on spam. Great. I'm certainly much more intrigued by the style of the creative -- sort of like the minimalist cartoons in the "Red Bull Gives You Wings" ads but with a slightly different font and a hyperlink-themed splash of color at the end.

And to that I say: pretty lame

It's just that it's so pedestrian, and certainly doesn't live up to the pretty consistent pace of innovation that Google delivers with its actual products. It's like they bought a rejected New Yorker cartoon and slapped a logo on it. Ew. If your stuff is as cool as Google's, you deserve better ads than this (the status quo of no ads would be better than this). I hope this isn't permanent -- I was assuming that the G-Unit would have rolled with something a little cooler than this In the short-term, I'm willing to chalk it up to some sort of localized UK campaign or low-level pilot/ test.

(I'm sure they'll get it together by the time they starting buying media in the U.S.; no one has yet to accuse the G-Unit of being (a) stupid or (b) bad at marketing. At some point we'll all enjoy a nice chuckle about this.)

Posted by thatkid at March 19, 2007 11:27 AM under Biznass

Comments

Posted by: bradglory at March 21, 2007 7:26 AM

Posted by: thatkid at March 24, 2007 11:42 AM

Post a comment

About ThatKid

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 thatkidinthecorner