Chrome Wasn't Built in a DayGoogle launches its first-ever TV ad campaign to get you to try its browser.
Posted Wednesday, May 13, 2009, at 7:02 AM ET
Last fall, Google released a new Web browser called Chrome that is speedy, elegant, and reliable. Just ask the 1.42 percent of people who use it.
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StumbleUponChrome has simply failed to catch on in its eight months of existence. To remedy the problem, the search company will start airing a television ad for Chrome in the United States. The ad—the first TV spot Google has ever run—is a twee, low-fi affair with a film-school-demo-reel aesthetic. It begins with a shot of wooden toy blocks in a tray. As arcade music plays, one of these blocks—the Chrome logo—begins caroming around the tray, vaporizing or transforming the other blocks until the setup looks like a browser window. At the end, an exhortation appears: "Install Google Chrome."
I appreciate the company's instinct here—Chrome is a fine browser, and more people should be using it. But the ad leaves viewers in the dark about what Google is selling. Sometimes it can make sense to hawk a mysterious product in the hopes that viewers will go online to find out what it is. For that strategy to work, however, the product has to be relatively simple to understand, and its benefits have to be obvious. That doesn't apply in the market for Web browsers. Getting people to switch is extremely difficult: According to the measurement firm Net Applications, about two-thirds of the world's Web surfers use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to go online, and they do so for one main reason—that's the browser that comes baked into Windows. Not all of these people are Luddites who don't realize their browser and the Internet are two different things. Many are simply unaware that there are any alternatives to Internet Explorer. Even if they have heard of Firefox or another alternative, they might not use the Web enough to see any compelling reason to switch to another browser. IE works fine for them. An ad aimed at convincing these users to switch to Chrome would need to be instructive rather than adorable. Perhaps it might show a side-by-side comparison of Chrome loading up popular sites faster than IE does or include testimonials from people explaining why using Chrome changed how they work online. Or here's a better idea—hire the ShamWow guy, and let him guide people through Chrome's best features. (Some of the online ads Google has posted do attempt to describe Chrome in more detail.)
But even the ShamWow strategy might not work. To a lot of people, the best browser in the world—one that loads every page in a nanosecond—could never be as awesome as a cloth that can suck up 20 times its weight in water. Those are the odds Google faces in its quest to make its browser dominant. What I love about Chrome is that it seems to have been designed specifically for power users—many of its features make life easier for people who spend countless hours online and for whom little shortcuts can be magical. For instance, I love that if I type a few words into its address bar, Chrome will fetch results from Google that I can jump to without having to make a stop at the search engine. But how many people will switch browsers for such a feature? The power-user base is small; most people who use the Web are likely pretty happy if their browser simply doesn't crash, and Chrome offers them little more incentive to switch.
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