

Google wouldn't have run their ad if it wasn't for statistics - tokenadult
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1717

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skennedy
The commercial is about Google positioning itself against a growing Bing
brand. Bing commercials often make fun of the numerous and nonsensical results
from other search engines (i.e., Google). Notice the commercial had perfect
answers at the top of each result set. As Bing hits the media hard, I expect
to see more commercials from Google.

Overall, a good execution by Google on its first commercial. Putting it on the
Super Bowl, all I can think is, "Go big or go home."

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invisible
This explains why the flight status # changed from previous runnings of this
ad (which had unrelated results in the top three). I was curious why they'd go
so far out of the way, but this makes sense. [See
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109079>]

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drc1912
Can we agree that it (according to the depth of the article) that this
decision wasn't made based on statistical analysis, but rather just ratings?
"ohhh... a bunch of people judged our video and liked it! Statistically we
can't NOT do it!"

Please stop attributing everything "scientists" do as hyper-analytical. It's
not like the analysis they did was more complex than what takes place in any
focus group - it was just scaled by a few orders of magnitude.

Was it a success? Yes. Was it a success because of statistical analysis? No.
It was a success because it was a good fucking ad.

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_delirium
Those don't seem like quite the right statistics, though. The main risk is
whether something that gets good reactions on YouTube will: 1) get good
reactions from a superbowl TV audience; and 2) actually drive enough traffic
to the company to be worth the cost. Just the YouTube viewer data doesn't
answer either of those questions. (They might have had other statistics on
that, of course, but if so, they haven't shared them.)

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ugh
What’s a Super Bowl audience? Doesn’t everyone watch? I’m from Europe, so
please forgive my ignorance, but it would be pretty absurd to claim there is a
World Cup final audience. I don’t know why that should be any different with
the Super Bowl. Skewed a bit, sure, but practically everyone watches.

Isn’t that what makes those ads so expensive in the first place?

I also would think that Google has pretty good data on who watches what on
YouTube and would like to add that ads must not always be about traffic but
can also be about branding.

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diN0bot
i've never seen the super bowl, and i have a few friends who "watch the
superbowl" at a get together that involves more go (board game) and cooking
than tv watching.

there are few things that "everyone" does, especially when you generalize
across a huge country with numerous cultural imports.

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ugh
I didn’t want to imply that literally everyone watches. But the ratings are
pretty impressive and don’t seem to be limited to one or other specific group.

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justinph
I can't decide if google's love of data and statistics is a good thing, or a
bad thing.

 _Looks at google stock price and earnings reports_ Hmm. Seems like a good
thing.

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aresant
This commercial was 100% about branding - the structure, music, content etc
was designed to build relationship.

The right thing to measure here would be user attrition.

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xs
Why not just use <http://www.ixquick.com/> and be done with it?

