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Google Search Stories–Including Batman!–Or Are They Anti-Bing Commercials in Disguise?

Kara Swisher — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:41:49 +0000

It’s well known that Google doesn’t do much in the way of marketing around its search service.

While you will catch advertising for the Chrome browser or for Android smartphones on the Web, given Google’s huge 70 percent market share in search, it hardly needs to attract users.

So, then, what is one to make of a series of new videos, which look suspiciously like commercials, that Google (GOOG) launched late last week on its blog and posted on a new channel on YouTube?

Called “Search Stories,” there are a half-dozen of the short videos, some more adorkable than others, which star the main search box.

One thing they have in common is that they have the look and feel of a marketing campaign, with the tag line “Search on.”

They also stress a variety of Google products, such as mapping, video, price comparisons, email and more.

One imagines what pre-Batman Bruce Wayne would look for, complete with ominous music, including search terms such as “coping with loss,” “flexible kevlar” and “gotham city crime statistics.”

Another video, called “Newbie,” has a grandmother searching on “keeping in touch with grandkids” and–in a clever dig at the MySpace and Facebook social networking services–“what is myfacebook,” which gets corrected by Google to “what is facebook.”

Could it be that the $100 million marketing push Microsoft (MSFT) launched for its Bing search service, which seems to be slowly gaining share, is starting to get on the nerves of those Spocks in Silicon Valley?

Not that Google would admit this, instead simply saying it was feeling all warm and fuzzy and so decided to make some kids-let’s-put-on-a-show videos.

Wrote Robert Wong of Google Creative Lab in a blog post, in part:

Because while we’re proud of the innovations we’re making in search, we’re proudest of the things people use search to accomplish. In other words, the best search results don’t show up on a webpage–they show up in somebody’s life.

So in that spirit, we made a bunch of videos. There’s one about grandma dipping her toe into technology. One about friends taking a Kerouac inspired road trip. And yes, there’s even one about Bruce Wayne.

Judge for yourself–here they all are:

Parisian Love

Mad to Live

Batman

Newbie

Potholes

High School

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Dear Tim: Here's a Tour of the It-Takes-a-Licking-but-Keeps-on-Ticking AOL Brand

Kara Swisher — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:02:42 +0000

What’s next for AOL?

Reviving the “You’ve Got Mail!” motto?

Or: “The Future. Now Available.”–set to music from “The Jetsons”?

What about: “So easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!”

Or maybe, it should just use a nice loooooooong busy signal as its calling card again?

Well, it could happen, now that new CEO Tim Armstrong has fallen prey to the siren call of the AOL moniker, as have many–way too many–before him.

After years of seeing the company wander in the anything-but-the-AOL wilderness, Armstrong has decided to try to welcome the prodigal brand back home, even as he prepares to spin it off in November from Time Warner (TWX), trading on the New York Stock Exchange once again under the AOL stock ticker.

Thus, he has renamed the Platform A advertising unit AOL Advertising; changed its unfortunately named People Networks–which is made up of the communications and community properties–to AOL Communications; and done the same for its MediaGlow, which is now under AOL Media.

There is also in the new AOL-centric universe: AOL Local & Mapping and AOL Ventures, where all the bad acquisitions–like the Bebo social networking service–go to die.

While BoomTown admires Armstrong’s moxie, there is some dicey past history related to the AOL brand–which I lovingly call the “Christine” of the Internet industry–that he might want to be aware of:

* The start-up from which AOL first sprung was named Control Video Corp., which was founded to create a device that would allow users of the Atari 2600 videogame machine to download games over telephone lines.

* After it tanked, CVC was reborn in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services, which had offerings with names like Q-Link for Commodore computers and AppleLink for Apple (AAPL) Macintosh computers.

* In October 1989, the-AOL CEO, Steve Case, announced a company contest: What should Quantum rename its main online service?

The suggestions that came in—Crossroads, Explore and Infinity—sounded like drug treatment programs or new car brands.

Dismissing them all, Case offered a bland creation of his own: America Online, with a second option of Online America.

Other staffers understandably derided it as hokey, but Case essentially stuffed the ballot box and voted his suggestion the winner anyway.

Later, he would change it to just its initials, AOL.

* Case also hit on the idea of attaching voice files to the software with cheery little sound bites that would make the service feel homey.

The team settled on four phrases: “Welcome,” “You’ve got mail,” “File’s done,” and “Goodbye.”

A customer service representative named Karen Edwards had mentioned that her husband, Elwood, was a professional broadcaster, so for testing purposes, Case asked if Elwood might read those four phrases into a cassette tape.

The test tape was put into use, and Elwood Edwards, quite by chance, ended up having one of the most listened-to voices on the planet.

* In July 1993, AOL marketing chief Jan Brandt supersized the AOL brand by asking Case for permission to spend $250,000 on a direct-mail campaign.

She recalls him telling her it wouldn’t work. He told me in an interview he did no such thing.

Whatever the case, she got permission, and thus began the very low-tech marketing blitz of hundreds of millions of disks that would make AOL a household name—and annoyance.

There were even AOL disks flash-frozen in Omaha Steaks.

* In a 1993 meeting between Case and then-Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Bill Gates, annoyed by the innovative start-up, Gates famously told Case, “I can buy 20 percent of you or I can buy all of you. Or I can go into business myself and bury you.”

None of those ever came to pass, which is a reason to cheer the AOL brand. But–given Microsoft’s weak record in the online business–this is also not saying much.

* AOL’s brand has gone through a lot of name-calling, some of it quite deserved. Here are some: “The Online K-mart,” “America On Hold,” “The Giant Sucking Sound.”

But this one from its earliest days is my favorite: “The Cockroach of Cyberspace.”

* AOL did a lot of television commercials to hype the service, some of which you can see below. In one especially weird one, AOL hired Adam West of the goofy “Batman” television series.

* When AOL and Time Warner announced their merger on January 10, 2000, and renamed the company AOL Time Warner, AOL owned 55 percent and the combined market valuation was thought to be in the hundreds of billions.

Today, with Google (GOOG) selling back its five percent stake in AOL, AOL’s value has plummeted to about $6 billion. Time Warner is currently worth just over $33 billion.

* When Jon Miller–now digital head at News Corp. (NWS) took over at AOL in mid-2002, after said merger failed miserably and the brand was taken off the corporate name, he spent some time visiting the company’s other divisions, and related an anecdote to me that he’d told them, to try to help move the relationships forward.

“Have you ever had your car towed in New York?” he said he’d ask executives in other divisions. “When your car gets towed, there’s a sign at the place where you go to pick it up that says, ‘The person behind this window did not tow your car. If you cooperate with them, you will get your car back quicker.’”

Tim, Time Warner is still waiting for Christine to be returned, so good luck with that rebranding!

And, while we await the turnaround, here is a little video I did for Tim about my (lack of) AOL branding expertise with my assistant Ed, and also some of the better AOL television commercials:

[ See post to watch video ]

Harry Potter and the Half-True Trailers

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:21:08 +0000

Last week, BoomTown posted on the amazing number of Joker impression videos related to the hit Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” that were popping up all over the Web.

Next up?

Well, it seems the honor will be going to Harry Potter knockoffs and tributes, due to the upcoming sixth movie in the series about the boy wizard, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

The movie is set to be released Nov. 21 and focuses on the early life of evil Lord Voldemort, when he was only a creepy orphan named Tom Riddle.

Here’s a video, below, of the actual trailer, which was recently released online and is playing in theaters.

And below that is a good example of one of the many user-created videos that tout the new Potter movie by using old clips to create new trailers. None of them is sanctioned by Warner Bros. (TWX), which is releasing the movie and will not likely discourage the phenomenon, as it builds excitement for the film.

"The Dark Knight": Joker Impressions Abound Online

Kara Swisher — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:09:41 +0000

Here’s a curious trend I’ve noticed developing quickly on YouTube, probably because of the acclaim that the late actor Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” has garnered.

His memorably malevolent turn in the latest Batman movie is likely to result a posthumous Oscar for Ledger. But perhaps more interesting is the number of fans who are doing video impressions of his performance, acting out various scenes from the movie, and posting them online in tribute.

Here are just such few videos, including ones that are dead serious and others not so much, as well as a compilation of Ledger’s various scenes at the end:

Joker/Batman Spoof

Joker Interrogation Scene

Joker Mob Meeting Scene

Joker Party Crashing Scene

Joker “Why So Serious?” Scene (as channeled by Hayden Black of “abigail’s ‘x-rated’ teen diary”)

Heath Ledger as Joker Compilation

Batman Trailer Mashup Lookalike

Kara Swisher — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:56:48 +0000

One of my favorite things about the Web is how quickly and effectively you can take media and mash it up into all sorts of new forms.

Case in point, this comparison of scenes from a trailer from the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight” and that of 1989’s original “Batman.”

Incredibly, many of the scenes are almost exactly alike.

(I had posted some trailers from “The Dark Knight” here, at the time of actor Heath Ledger’s death in January. Ledger stars in the upcoming movie as a very malevolent Joker.)

See the trailer mashup here, which is on CollegeHumor:

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

The Very Dark Knight

Kara Swisher — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:04:47 +0000

Until the writers’ strike in Hollywood is over–who knew it would go on this long?–BoomTown has decided to offer suggestions about stuff to watch.

It is hard to look away from the swirl of media that the untimely and tragic death of Heath Ledger has engendered, and the Internet has jacked the frenzy into overdrive.

Along with an explosion of Web stories and video about the late actor–unfortunately too, please-don’t videos from outside the home of his family seem particularly appalling–there has also been controversy around a very prominent online marketing campaign that has been going on related to the next in the blockbuster Batman series, “The Dark Knight.”

Why? Because it has been focused almost exclusively on Ledger, who plays what appears to be a very warped and malevolent version of the villainous Joker (pictured here).

A terrific story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday looked at this Internet-aimed marketing effort around the Warner Bros. movie, set to come out this summer.

It’s been a slowly unfolding viral campaign online, stretching three-quarters of a year now, almost all focused on Ledger’s Joker character. It began in May with a site showing a fictional district attorney candidate, IBelieveinHarveyDent.com (still up) and then another with a defaced picture and clues, IBelieveinHarveyDentToo.com (now you only get a “page not found” message).

There have been lots of efforts like this with sites like the Gotham Times and a scarier version called the HaHaHa Times.

And, of course, the many trailers, seen below, which are all over the Web now.

But now that the already creepy online effort has taken on an even more macabre tone, one wonders what Warner Bros. will do.

Or, because this is the Web, where things tend to spin out of the control of media companies, whether the movie company can do anything at all.

Here’s some trailers, all of which are pretty amazing: