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Google Chrome Ad Takes Over New York Times Homepage

Submitted by Ryan Spoon on May 19, 2009 – 2:40 pmView Comments

Google continues to advertise aggressively for their web browser, Google Chrome. Today, they took over the right side of the New York Times homepage with an expanding video ad that rotates through different Chrome commercials (called “Chrome Shorts”). In itself, it is interesting that Google is marketing the browser so prominently… but never really mentioning the product, benefits, and so forth (entirely the opposite approach of the new Microsoft ads, for instance).

Here is where the campaign is bizarre though:

1. I use Google Chrome. Why pay to promote Google Chrome to me… when I have already converted? Seems wasteful…

2. The ad interaction is actually broken within Google Chrome. The ad expands but will not play – rather, it collapses when you try to hover over any of the videos… which in turn is not the greatest selling point for the product it is trying to promote

google-chrome-nytimes

Popularity: 6% [?]

  • flowers_russia
    Google Chrome plus Google OS - soon Google will be ours everything.:)
  • Not only ad interaction but there are formatting problems I met in many sites using Chrome. Probably something wrong in the object model... I'll waite until G fix it - I'm sure they will. :)
  • max
    i use chrome and it played fine
  • Turns out that I have an old version of Chrome (1.0.154.65). After upgrading, works fine.
  • No way asshole, works fine
  • las3rjock
    The ad worked fine for me (Google Chrome 2.0.180.0 on Windows 7).
  • Eddy
    It works fine for me in Chrome (all videos play, no glitches or problems). Are you up to date? Hit the spanner menu and choose 'about' to find out.
  • Chaz
    Two reasons to market to you:

    1) It's hard to not market to you. Ad targeting by browser is probably doable, but not out of the box. And for just a small overdelivery/discount of about 1% (Chrome market share, give or take), it's not worth it to build such targeting for just one client (Firefox/Safari/IE aren't paying money to promote a browser ...)

    2) Part of marketing is to make your customers feel better about their decision ... turning conversions into loyalty. You're now supposed to feel smug.

    But (1) and (2) don't matter if the ad is broken ... that's just lame.
  • #1: great point and I totally agree.

    #2: that one totally backfired with the broken ad.... you could argue that it did the opposite of reinforcing loyalty and making me "feel smug".

    That said, I love Chrome and this wouldn't affect that (but please bring up the extensions???). Funny nonetheless.
  • broken when viewed in Chrome, that is sad.
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