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Much has been said about Google’s Parisian Love superbowl ad in the last week, much of it ranging from positive to gushing adoration. I was no exception, discussing the way google demonstrated its understanding of the culture of seeking. My last post focused on the content of the ad, which was lovely, but content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A quotation from Ian Schafer, and my consequent discussion with him on twitter, inspired me to write a follow-up that looks at the ad in context.

affective effects, effective affects

Google’s Parisian Love inspired a lot of amorous reciprocation from people who’ve devoted a significant chunk of their intellectual energies to thinking about advertising and made a dent on twitter, but it didn’t make it into Nielsen’s most liked or most recalled ads. Part of it was the Q3 placement, of course. Almost all of the highest Nielsen-ranked spots ran during the first and last quarters of the game — presumably when more people were tuned in to the action. But nevertheless, the question remains: Google spot was certainly affecting, but was it effective?

“An online film that became an ad”

Google’s ad feels out of place amongst the raucous humor and tone of not only the other big ads, but the superbowl in general. But here I think Google again goes deeper than the surface presentation, beyond what a big sporting event looks like to what it means, it’s place in our culture(s). Major sporting events, particularly those on a national scale, bank heavily on the idea of disparate atomized individuals coming together in shared sentiment, much like the death of a celebrity. They also play strongly to feelings of community, connectivity, nostalgia, and legacy. In that light, Google’s ad seems to match the emotional appeals of the event, if not its tone and presentation.

Its disparity in presentation is also consistent with Google’s brand, which leans heavily on a certain iconoclasm, the myth of a rag-tag team of innovators that consistently proves to the world that big doesn’t mean bad. In this sense, the biggest danger to Google’s brand is its own success. Google new Buzz sought to collect all our current social media tendencies under one google-sponsored ad-driven roof and triggered a privacy controversy and user backlash, they just bought Aardvark, memorably acquired YouTube and some other smaller services a while back, and just got into hot water for shutting down music blogs. The more prominent and pervasive Google’s services get, the more difficult it becomes to fend of the mumblings of big-brotherism, of being just another mega-corporation consolidating its power, however benevolent its origins. That’s why Google’s Superbowl ad had to be “ineffective” in advertising-response terms. Superbowl advertising is a beacon of corporate, profit-driven consumerism and Google’s challenge has always been proving to us that it’s based in different values.

But perhaps most importantly, as Faris Yakob’s great analysis explains, in a lot of ways, the Superbowl spot wasn’t an advertisement for its search product at all. It was a demonstration to potential advertisers, according to Andrew Frank, that it “is not afraid of TV” and can integrate the internet with traditional broadcast media. Parisian Love wasn’t a commercial — it was just another one of Google’s series of online videos. That Parisian Love ran on TV, during the Superbowl, was the advertisement. In other words, Google’s ad didn’t suit its context. The context was the advertisement.

Image by Carolita Johnson, demonstrating the difference between recognizing a trend and understanding its deeper significance

Google made good on all the teasing tweets and ran its first superbowl ad on Sunday night, to the praise of advertising and marketing professionals and all those who fall under Alterian’s Social Engagement Index. I was preoccupied with making sure the make-shift stadium seating in my loft wasn’t in danger of collapsing to catch it during the game, but the next morning I watched it on YouTube. Then I watched it again.

Google’s Parisian Love is everything that people have been saying: remarkable in potency of its message and the simplicity of its delivery, startlingly efficient in conveying a multitude of themes and features, and narratively delightful. But it is also a beautifully concise argument for the need to understand culture — and not just trends and technologies — in advertising.

Trends are surface patterns that can be viewed from a distance. Culture is the all the reasons underneath them, the complex structures and formations on the ocean floor shaped from countless years of symbolic debris and sediment that dictate which way the waves go. Identifying trends is just the first (and crucial) step towards understanding culture.

Humanizing technology, technologizing humanity

The trends/culture distinction is most clearly illustrated when we place Google’s Parisian Love series alongside Bing’s “Cure for Search Overload” campaign, which the Google ad also functions as a response to. Bing’s ads demonstrate their ability to identify habits of digitized world — the tendency towards free-association clicking, those rabbit-hole link excursions that leave us knowing more about walruses than we ever thought possible (or desirable) — by framing it as a problem that its service provides a solution to. Google’s ad shows us not how to salvage our lives from technology, but how technology is a part of it. In contrast to Bing, Google’s ad demonstrates how its search guidance and decision tools were so deeply integrated and intuitive that we barely noticed it was there, letting us put our concerns and desires at the forefront.

The two search engines’ ads reveal opposing angles of approach. Bing’s approach is strangely didactic, and not a little condescending — it presents us a service that can stop us from doing something (finding too much potentially irrelevant information), that can save us from our own feeble tendencies. Google’s approach is conspirational, showing it what it can help make happen instead of what it can stop from happening, implicating itself as complicit in our desires while also tapping into the cultural symbol of what the web has historically has represented: openness, possibility, limitless potential and access. So, while Bing identified a set of behavioral trends and promised to help us find things, Google showed us that it understands why we look.

Cultures of accumulation and classification

Google’s Parisian Love also conjured up for me three famous French writers and cultural critics: Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, and Roland Barthes. Proust transformed searching as an act of desire and recovery, Perec showed us how evocatively life is documented in lists and classifications of the things we accumulate, and Barthes made us recognize that it is the seemingly everyday, taken-for-granted habits and pleasures that reveal the most about our cultural mythologies and our human selves. Google’s ad demonstrates all three principles.

The potent little story at the heart of Parisian Love isn’t particularly remarkable in itself. What is remarkable is the materials of the telling: a love story, yes, but as documented through a search history. It touches upon a long-held cultural conviction that our daily debris, if properly recorded and curated, tells a story fascinating about us. Consider the rise of epistolary novels, Perec’s list of beds he’s slept in, the countless art installations featuring every X-type of object that the artist has consumed over a year. This is a conviction that’s only risen in recent years as we have the means of accumulating and displaying more and more haphazard data about ourselves — we’ve all given thought to what stories our twitter feeds, delicious tags, and facebook profile interests might tell about us accumulated over time.

In that same way, Googles ad reminds us that our searches are not only about finding what we need — they are a document of our desires and lives. The nostalgic overtones aren’t just incidental appeals to sentiment — they do the serious work of assuring us that in an age of so-called information overload, we are still producing artifacts of data that are intimate and revealing. At the forefront is a story about romance, but underneath is a story about our culture’s love affair with the stories the accumulated by-products of our daily lives can tell. Google proposes not only that its search is useful, but meaningful.

The message from google to its users is so simple and clear: we’ve always understood one another.

Like many, I’ve been following the whole Google/China situation with some interest, it part because it really touches upon one of the central tensions surrounding increasingly globalized cultural and information networks and technological/legal infrastructures still organized around the nation-state. There’s been a ton written on it, but a few more comprehensive/interesting pieces:

• Of course, the official google blog statement regarding the matter and the Chinese government’s response.
• Darmishta over at the Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw blog has a pretty solid news round-up of the issue, including a link to the open letter from Issac Mao, a blogger in China, appealing to Google not to pull out.
• And I admit, I’m biased, but C3 also has a good roundup of key pieces in the discussion, as well as some commentary on the whole global/national tensions present in digital culture along the language and acess angle.
• ReadWriteWeb’s Richard Macmanus also discusses how this relates to google’s big competitor, Baidu. And Sarah Lacy over at TechCrunch points out that the whole Google or Baidu question isn’t just about China.

On the globalization and media tip, a few less newsy and more thinky things:

• Starting first with Aswin Punathambekar’s syllabus for his Media Globalization graduate seminar, which has lots and lots of great readings to dig into for anyone interested in how to think about media in a transnational context. Which, I think given how relevant we consider Google/China to our everyday lives, should be just about everyone.
• In Aswin’s syllabus is a link to a piece by Amitava Kumar about the limits of postcolonial theory, which in a way is also about the limits of theory as a whole.
• I’ve also recently been recommended the work of David Harvey, which I’ll start in on as soon as I procure some ebooks.

Back to more immediate media + culture stuff:

• If you haven’t by now, everyone should be reading Grant McCracken’s new book Chief Culture Officer. I admit, it’s another bias of mine, not just because Grant is full of awesome 24/7, but also the book basically makes a case for why people like me and many of my friends and colleagues should exist. Cultural understanding is crucial to the health of corporations, brands, media producers and it isn’t just something that happens. It’s a studied, systematic process, a skill-set that should be nurtured and deployed.
• A couple of pieces following Ford’s push into the media space: Karl Greenberg over at Marketing Daily and the AdAge Mediaworks piece from Craig Daitch. Have yet to gather my thoughts on this, but it does seem something worth watching.
• Finally, in a back to roots kind of move, I’m looking to start in on some of the readings listed in Henry Jenkin’s Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 syllabus. I didn’t even realize it when I first glanced at it, but if you scroll down to the section on global media, there’s a chapter from my thesis in there.

On a totally random note, I just realized that the two videos that were part of a project that I did with Kevin Driscoll, Whitney Trettien, and Lauren Silberman at MIT regarding Soulja Boy back in 2007, where a bunch of us in lab coats and GNU Richard Stallman danced the Crank Dat dance now has nearly half a million hits (almost 390,000 on one, and 80,000) on another. Granted, these numbers are nothing by YouTube standards, but still, a bit trippy for a random class project video done on an east campus lawn.