Google spending money on TV advertising? What’s happening to the world? It’s Monday morning so we thought we’d share the ad Google paid $2.5 million dollars to air. It was shown during the US Superbowl yesterday.

It truly is a simple brand campaign, but a good one at that. This is part of a campaign called Google’s ‘search stories’. What’s very interesting from a media and marketing perspective is that for over ten years Google dismissed brand advertising as a waste of cash. Eric Schmidt described it as the ‘last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America’.

So why the sudden and dramatic change of heart? Could it be the arrival of Bing? Probably not. Could it be Twitter? Perhaps. Could it be the fact Google is fast becoming a technology company that sells phones and has plans to make its own iPad? Most likely.

If Google is to full compete with Apple in the mobile marketing and technology sectors it is going to have to spend money on its brand. As Schmidt tweeted: “Hell has indeed frozen over”. By the way, in polls taken after the Superbowl the Google ad was deemed ‘most popular’.

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