I'm surprised they advertised search, and not, say, the Nexus One or any of their newer products. Still, definitely one of the best commercials I've seen.
If you "read between the lines" you can see that they didn't advertise search, the advertised the Google brand. The search theme was just a means to deliver the message that the Google brand is an important part of our everyday life (as in this example, Google accompanies the protagonist through his Parisian romance).
Yep, but at this point, Google is literally synonymous with search. Android, however is still much less recognizable than the iPhone. Then again, marketing to that many people is something of a science, and I admit to not understanding it well.
Google may be synonymous with search. However, huge portions of the population have not integrated search into their lives as tightly as you and I have (Google says I've done 19k searches and averaged about 550 a month last year -- I rather doubt my typical customer has). Evangelizing search to the rest of the population makes Google serious amounts of money -- that is one reason they've been dumping a lot into advertising search as a desired behavior this year (in Japan at least).
Both the US and Japan are rich countries with ubiquitous net access and mature Internet markets, right? What do you think was the growth in the number of searches last year for each country? Pick a percentage.
Here's the real numbers: http://bit.ly/aFdenY (I used bit.ly only because the URL gives away the surprise.)
I don't think we're anywhere near Peak Search, either. (For example, I'm seeing YOY growth in the 50% region on some very popular queries for non-techie customers like, e.g., [halloween bingo cards].)
Thanks for that link. That's a huge change for 2009! I believe that hanging around tech people gives one the false impression that Google has saturated the search market.
