Excuse my lateness to this, but last month hell froze over:
I've never believed that, as some claim, big branding campaigns and/or TV advertising will die any time soon. It's just become one weapon in a brand's armoury, rather than the only or default one. Any time you gets serious competition on product grounds (as Google now has with Bing) it becomes important to build emotional values into the brand - and TV (ie moving pictures + sound + big screen) is still the best way to do that.
And I think it's a very clever ad. It's incredibly hard to infuse emotion into a) a web-based brand, b) a demonstration ad, c) an impersonal global brand. But somehow they found a way of doing it.
Whilst we're on Google, all media owners need to heed Martin Sorrell's recent words:
“Google is a media owner, not a technology company.”
NBC/ITV/Sky should be afraid. But at least they might be getting some ad monies from their nemesis along the road to their destruction.
