Search on…Google?

Google advertising?  Heresy!

Didn’t they build their brand and business without any advertising?

Not really.

Actually Google has been advertising for years.  Mostly online and in the trade press.  And in sponsorships.  More and more in consumer media, including TV, as they’ve pushed further into such as mobile phones.

The Superbowl buy was really quite brilliant in many ways.  First of all, it got people like me blogging about it, so it grabs far, far more attention than if they ran this on Chuck or The Daily Show. In that sense it will be like the Apple 1984 spot which people still talk about.

With so many other advertisers opting out of the game this year (where was Pepsi?), Google probably got a great price for the media.  Well, relatively speaking since even a cheap Superbowl spot is a hell of a lot of media dollars.

The ad itself shows that you don’t need to spend a kazillion dollars on production to create a tv spot.  And the ad itself tells a story — no points of differentiation, no claims of superiority.

I expect to see more of this from Google.  And I expect that their CSR efforts will be elevated, too.  It must be a shock for them to be under the scrutiny of EU regulators.  They are now a grown up company.