This very interesting outdoor campaign for Google Video Germany used a billboard imitating a real-life video player that captures the life as it happens. The tagline is "any film you can imagine", a simple message that encourages people to search for videos and to upload their own videos. AdFreak has an interesting explanation for the unusual idea: the see-through billboards suggest "that online video presents life in all its glorious randomness".

It's not very clear if the campaign was launched before or after the YouTube acquisition, but the fact that the video embedded below is from YouTube tells a lot about Google Video's success.

This incredibly beautiful video is an ad created by Saatchi & Saatchi Moscow to promote Gmail in Russia. As Google Translate doesn't have speech recognition, I would be grateful if someone translates the message of Gmail's ad. From what I understand, the ad illustrates the human side of Gmail by recreating it in real life.


A related idea can be found in Be Kind Rewind's website, where the Internet is rebuilt from scratch.

{ Thank you, Maksym and Kristaps. }

Google became popular without having to use advertising to promote its search engine. People liked the tool and started to recommend it to others. Even if Google uses its own advertising system to promote some of its services, Google has always been reluctant to use traditional advertising. Here are some of the few offline Google ads:

* a billboard that asked you to solve a Math problem: find the first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e. If you visited the site and answered other complicated questions, you were directed to Google's jobs site.



* job ads posted in newspapers: "Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations" (Wired), "Are you scary smart?" (New York Times)

* 15-seconds TV ads on a science program from PBS, in 2005. "The spots, which quietly launched at the end of the summer, start with the keywords string theory, Egyptology, and astronomy being typed into a search bar; as the terms are typed in, videos that relate to the subject appear behind the search bar. The spots end with the tagline: Google is proud to support NOVA in the search for knowledge." This is probably the first brand ad for Google (here's the video).

In the recent months, Google started to promote its own products using undisclosed ads or partnerships with media companies. Last week, Google 411 graduated from Labs and it's promoted using billboards and taxi ads in San Francisco.




Google, which is still trailing behind Baidu in China, intends to heavily advertise its products to gain more market share. "Google has not done any marketing until now. But in China there are many users who are new to the internet, and many other name-brand search engines," said Lee Kai-fu, Google China's president.

"By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another," says Google in "Ten things Google has found to be true". But even though search is almost synonymous with Google, the company still has services that are unknown to the general public and important markets to conquer.

The wait is over. Google launched an interesting challenge last month: "Help us imagine how an email message travels around the world."

"A few of us on the Gmail team came up with an idea to stitch together a bunch of video clips that all share one element: someone hands the Gmail M-velope in from the left of the screen, and hands it off to the right. Put them all together, and they form one long chain of hand-offs," detailed the Gmail Blog. The number of responses was impressive: more than 1,000 videos that included Gmail's M-velope logo. Google selected some of the best videos, edited them and created a final video that showcases some of the most important values behind Gmail: creativity, collaboration and fun.