1 HN recommender · recommended in 9 months, 2010–2025
0:52 · 8.7M views · Nov 19, 2009
Google's 2009 'Search Stories' ad, shown in the Super Bowl, tells the story of an American who falls in love in Paris entirely through search queries.
HN cites it as a model of emotional product storytelling and as inspiration for visualizing one's own search history as a narrative.
9 comments from Hacker News
Hmm... something like this? Maybe this video left out the brainwashing part. this video (Google's famous ad, "Parisian Love", worth watching for those who haven't seen it yet)
Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic. The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale . Business is a series of transactions , and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it. You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom
This looks like fb comment page than a hacker news one. So I just downloaded all of my search activity into nice JSON files, and now I am going to apply a bit of data science and magic stuff using Python and Node.JS and I will have a nice profile of myself for the past 11 years: 1) What kind of questions did I ask google? (beginning with how, when, where etc) - how do these questions connect to my personal and career development? 2) Apply some sentiment analysis using sentiment.js on the search terms and find out if the particular search term was positive, negative or neutral (this will give me a nice overview of my mood for each day I searched for the last one decade) 3) do some filtering and data massaging to pick out the exceptions (ok just a cursory look at the file helped me discovered a forgotten website project I did 10 years ago as part of college summer project - a work I am extremely proud of during that time and even now.) - which days, months, the year I searched the most (or what events triggered the searches - a breakup, a job search or a side project) 4) discover interesting patterns of my search profile (what I searched most during college time, after college when searching for a job, before marriage, after marriage etc.) 5) make a video on the lines of this video so many f cking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what? Google has a copy of the same too? baby cry * What am gonna do? In a larger scheme of things, my data profile is just too insignificant.
It really is a shame that so much of the Android marketing has taken its cue from Verizon's techno-masculine Droid branding. Google was dead on with the Nexus One's "Web Meets Phone" ad. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching - right at the center of Google's brief expressive / cute / minimalist advertising phase. Think back to the "Parisian Love" Super Bowl ad and the Motion Theory "Google Chrome" short. They're delightful. These shorts present Google as a very different company - one that's personal, bright, and helpful. Much of this work is coming from (or commissioned by) a division called Creative Lab that's largely independent from the majority of Google's culture and management structure. I had the pleasure of collaborating with them on a couple projects and was amazed by their creativity, insight, and lighthearted approach. I would love to see more work in this style from Google. They've demonstrated they're perfectly capable of creating very good ads that deliver a consistently solid impression, but have ceded much of the opportunity to brand Android to carriers who have screwed it up to the nines (though we shouldn't forget that the platform is actually called "Android"), with the lone exception of HTC's highly personal commercials. I hope they can turn it around. If and when they do, I further hope that it will be a part of a more comprehensive strategy to rebrand Android as a whole. It's a solid platform with a lamentably robotic image. --- [1] Nexus One ad:
This touches on what I see as a pretty big deal for social networks going forward, although Path is probably not the right app to solve the problem. We have been throwing all this data about ourselves into all these different apps for as long as 6-7 years now (much more intensively over the last 2 though), but don't have a meaningful way to browse through it, or even find anything in it. Timeline is another major step in this direction, but as of now still has a way to go. Everyone's talking about what these networks our doing with our data, but what are WE doing with our own data? I keep coming back to Google's Parisian Love commercial, if only we could have our own online history presented the same way: this video