The company that became a household name based purely on word-of-mouth is about to run television ads for their Chrome browser.
The company has been trying to grab a share of the market since Chrome was released through links on their online properties, to “viral” content like these comic books:
And these videos:
The irony is too much: The company that pioneered on-demand advertising is going the old school interruption advertising route to promote it’s new technology.
While trying to enter the browser market may seem pointless at first blush, what with Microsoft, Firefox and Apple’s Safari dominating the browser landscape, there are some good reasons Google might want want to bite off a percentage of that pie, even if it’s just a sliver.
Owning a piece of the browser market pie would give Google a vehicle through which to collect valuable user behavior that can then be fed back into improving their search results and, ultimately, their bottom line by selling precisely targeted, efficient advertising.
Google’s search engine dominance is due to the fact that the company’s technology is so much better than its competitors and that is because Google understands what you want better than Yahoo!, Live.com, and Ask.
The other piece of this is Android. By building browser market share with Chrome, Google also builds expectations among consumers that they should be able to have Chrome on their mobile devices.
Chrome is baked into Google’s G1 phone but the iPhone, Blackberry and others dominate the smart phone market, so building demand for a mobile Chrome will put pressure on Google’s smart phone competitors to offer their customers a choice of browser.
The mobile Web is largely virgin territory, so there again, understanding how people behave in that environment is in Google’s long-term bottom-line interests.
The e-Strategy Academy covers all aspects of digital marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, mobile marketing & public relations.