Interesting graph breaking down Apple’s Revenue. Growth appears to be coming from mostly the iPhone. Will the iPad keep up?

Google, the company who’s avoided commercial advertising and build its brand largely through word-of-mouth (even thought selling advertising is where Google makes it’s money) ran an ad on the superbowl yesterday, the mother-load of all advertising spots.

If you missed it, it’s a simple ad showing just the Google homepage and search results documenting a series of searches over time which subtly tells a love story. The searches start with “study abroad in paris” and evolve through other topics such as, meeting places for a date, translations of french (“you’re very cute”), “how to impress a french girl”, “chocolate shops in paris”, “long distance relationship advice”, “jobs in paris”, tracking flights to Paris, finding a church in paris, and finally, “assembling a crib”. A heartwarming love story is told through search….

What is Google’s Parisian Love Superbowl ad really telling us though?

I derived two subtle points which Google may not want communicated very much.

First, the essence of the ad makes it very clear that Google’s policy of tracking one’s searches over time and recording every single search ever logged on it’s servers is quite powerful (and scary). The reality is just as the searches portrayed in this commercial lead one to a logical conclusion of events, all of our searches (and most of us search many times each day) allow Google to compile a “story”, or what advertisers would call a profile, on each and everyone of us. This is about as close to big brother technology as our world has come. Phase I of Parisian Love might be a cute little love story, but what if phase II include searches such as “finding a divorce lawyer in Paris”, “how to fight Parisian courts for custody”, “managing joint custody when parents live in different countries”, etc…. is that information still cute and benign? Or is the saving of such search information breaching the company’s own mantra of “do no evil?”

The second subtle take-away is that television ads work, and there is still no substiture for the mass reach of the superbowl. For all of the money Google is generating in online advertising (often at the expense of shifting television and print budgets), this online company is opting to buy TV ads to promote it’s online search business and further build it’s brand. Interesting…

What do you think?
View Google’s Superbowl Ad here

My comment on the article says it all…

Adotas » Real-Time Will Redefine Media-Buying Efficiency.

Reports of the death of ad networks are greatly exaggerated…  See this recent study of media planners and buyers citing wider use of ad networks, particularly vertical ad networks.  Main reasons cited:  Cost Effectiveness.  The three most important qualities in ad networks are targeting, transparency and quality… all our sweet spot.

Ad Network Adoption Up.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the impact that search engines are having on writing.  Almost every web publisher I know now trains their authors and freelancers to write in a “search engine friendly” way.  Entire firms bill themselves as producers of “search engine friendly content”.  Many interactive ad agencies a measured and compensated based on their ability to attract traffic through, among other things, writing SEO-friendly content.  It seems today’s authors give more credence to “keyword density” than they do to being grammatically correct.

What does this trend mean for our society at large?  For centuries, man has expressed his thoughts, emotions, and wonders through all forms of art, including literature.  But today, most content creators are cow-tailing to computers (Search Engines in particular) as we put our prose on paper.  Our very thoughts that precede the written word are changing based on the question, “How will Google respond to this?”.  Is this healthy?  Is this human?  We are answering to machines.

Changing the written word to appeal the masses is not a new concept.  Newspapers forever have dummied down their work to a 5th grade reading level so that the masses can both enjoy and understand the articles they publish.  But we’re writing with an eye for how a computer, not for people, will read (spider) and like (does it abide by their rules) our content.  It’s different.

Some would argue that without significant changes in our educational system, future generations will not reach the same intelligence levels as past generations. If our language and thought themselves are being influenced by the keywords and terms that the masses are entering into search engines, does that create a negative spiral towards intelligence regression? Maybe this is why Eric Schmidt is encouraging President Obama to focus on education as a core platform.

In order to gain our fair share of “clicks”, we tend to cover topics that are frequently searched. What does this do to the quality of topics we write about today? Read any good articles on Brittney Spears lately? There are plenty to choose from and more every day. After all she’s a popular search term.

Google if you are listening… follow the mantra of do no evil and lead the world toward Google Scholar types of results, not Brittney Spears. Why did you create Google Scholar as a differentiated product anyway? Are real academic writings something to be stuck up on the top shelf where they are hard to reach?

The below article does not cover this topic specifically, but does raise some interesting questions about the nuances of cultural languages being eradicated (or perhaps “decided by Google”) over time… interesting read.

MediaPost Publications Is Google Changing The Queen’s English? 01/15/2010.

I’ve seen a lot of projections on the explosive growth of mobile including one’s like below:

MediaPost Publications Gartner: Mobile To Outpace Desktop Web By 2013 01/14/2010.

My thoughts on this are mixed.  While I think being untethered from the PC is a huge advantage, and while mobile phone distribution due to lower costs and less infrastructure has the potential to spread much wider than that of the Internet connected PC, I still think the mobile web has a long way to go.  For one, the interface and speed (I’m on the AT&T network and iPhone’s are choking bandwidth so perhaps I’m negatively biased on the speed issue) still need a lot of improvements.  Additionally, from a personal level, I will use mobile to do a quick update of a Facebook status, or to send a tweet or to look up a phone number for a restaurant or a map, but I don’t really spend any quality reading time on my mobile device.  The screen is just too small.  I love my Kindle for reading.  I spend hours reading it and enjoy the time I spend… I use my PC for an eight hour plus workday straight, reading much of the time… I just can’t spend the same kind of time reading my mobile device.

What do you think?

Is Twitter a Mental Vacuum?.  Good article on the relevance and importance of the (sometimes gibberish) that is taking place on Twitter.  Is only 27% of the information “useful”?  There’s an awful lot of talking about ourselves taking place… what you had for breakfast, where you’re  doing, where you’re going, etc…  We need a tool to separate the pearls from the rocks.

Apps Are the Next Publishing Platform :: MinOnline.  Good article discussing results of a Quattro Wireless Publisher survey on use of Apps.  63% of Content providers have already developed at least one App.   Quattro Wireless was just bought by Apple for $275MM, an acquistion which fuels the fire between Apple and Google in the arms race for Mobile Ads.

Nice article of the Advertising Market across many major industries by Ad Age.  Summarizes 2009 (where we stand) and looks into 2010 (where we’re heading)

Advertising: Planning Your Next Move in Ad Land – Advertising Age – News.

According to the WSJ, 2009 Q4 activity pleased to the upside in the advertising market with pent-up demand finally being set loose.   Too early to call a rebound, but even the newspaper and magazine companies saw a lift in print advertising.

Late Flurry of Ad Dollars Fans Recovery Hopes – WSJ.com.  (need a subscription to view… thank Rupert)