Google is taking to an old-fashioned medium to promote its Chrome browser: TV commercials. The company kicked off the campaign on Tuesday night with ads airing during “Glee” and “One Tree Hill.” Google Creative Lab created the campaign—Google’s biggest ever offline promotion—with the ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Google believes that the more people it can convince to use Chrome, the more people it can continue to lure into using Google products.
The campaign, called “the Web is what you make of it,” makes an appeal to emotion in hopes that potential customers who don’t care about the browser’s speed or technical specifications will respond to ads based on meaningful, real-life stories—which just happen to involve Google products. One ad shows a father creating a scrapbook for his daughter in Gmail. Another ad shows people using YouTube to record videos for the It Gets Better Project, telling gay teens subjected to bullying that there’s a brighter future for them.
Ads for Chrome will also appear online, in the form of white boxes with scrolling inspirational phrases like “make yourself heard” and “make a declaration.” At the end of each ad is a button that says, “Switch to a new browser. Download Google Chrome.”