Day 2

Today we watched quite a few product placement videos. This is something that I have seen creeping into television programs for some time now. The Real World clearly has an exclusive contract with Subway because those twenty-somethings sure do eat there all the time. CSI (all three) constantly bombard viewers with "subtle" product placement whether it be the car they're driving or the phone they're using. These product placements don't seem to bother me as long as they don't interrupt the flow of the TV show. As soon as the dialog and plot is interrupted with a jarring, inappropriate product placement I will change my tune. For now, I'm happy to take this in return for being able to fast forward through commercials.

This leads me to our assignment for the evening: to look up advertisements for a brand that I am loyal to. I was excited to do this because the brand that I'm looking up ads for is Google. I don't watch commercials as Tivo allows me to badoop-a-doop (that's the term that we use for the noise that the fast forward button makes) right on through them. Tivo is another brand that I am 100% loyal to and I will have to look into that one a bit later as well. Anyway, I was curious to see what the Google ads would be like because, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen one before. I'm assuming that these ads run on television and perhaps on the internet as well. I found one that I absolutely love for Google Chrome (best web browser ever!): http://youtu.be/R4vkVHijdQk. It's a story told through an email trail about a... well... you should just watch it for yourself :) I also enjoyed this ad for the Google search engine: http://youtu.be/tQ4unnMgiSQ. Aside from the products themselves, these ads are selling an emotion, a desire for human connection. They both tug on your heartstrings and give you that warm gooey good feeling on the inside. You can feel the love through the ads themselves. To me, the subtext is that Google is providing you with the tools to ease these human connections and to allow you more time to focus on the things that you love in life because it is user friendly, high speed, efficient, and intelligent. So, yes, the Google ads that I viewed are selling the qualities that I identified as important to me. No, Google did not pay me to write any of this.