Google Chrome Research Paper

A Review of Google Chrome’s Campaign: The Web is What You Make of It
Jordan Crandell
James Madison University

Abstract
In 2011, Google Chrome launched its campaign “The Web is What You Make of It”. In this paper, I will review the campaign using two of the commercials introduced on TV: “Dear Sophie”, a narrative about a little girl growing up as seen through the eyes of her father, and “It Gets Better”, a motivational clip about a community rising against the bullying of homosexual youths. I used the Persuasion Knowledge Model in order to analyze the study and looked at three separate persuasion concepts: emotional appeals, warmth appeals, and the use of narratives/ personal anecdotes. I was able to determine that Google Chrome did an excellent job employing all three of these concepts in both of their advertisements.


A Review of Google Chrome’s Campaign: The Web is What You Make of It
         With the increasing popularity of the Internet, we currently live in a world where everything is ‘viral’. In the US alone, Internet users watched over 25 billion online videos in August of 2009. YouTube is the largest individual site, accounting for 10 billion of those views (Southgate, 2010). We put the majority of our lives online, so there’s no surprise that advertisement campaigns have also infiltrated the web. What is a surprise is that advertisers are not necessarily the ones putting the videos up. According to previous research, viral advertising is “unpaid peer-to-peer communication of content originating from an identified sponsor using the Internet to persuade or influence an audience to pass along content to others" (Southgate, 2010, p. 350). In other words, viewers are the ones taking TV ads and posting them online where they go on to become viral sensations. This can be a great help to marketers who are essentially receiving free advertising for their message, because online viewing gives the opportunity for deeper brand engagement, since viewers are choosing to watch the ads and can interact with the video, replaying, rating, commenting, or forwarding it (Southgate, 2010, p. 350).

         Google is an example of one company profitting from viral video exposure. The organization has broken five of the top 10 most effective Website TV ads this year (Ace, 2011). Of the 130 national TV ads to launch the same week as Google’s “Dear Sophie” ad, Google’s was rated the most effective, according to Ace Metrix™, the authority in television advertising effectiveness. (Ace, 2011) For marketers, emphasis is usually on "attentional effects" of ad creativity, or “if they stand out in ad clutter and therefore receive more attentional resources from potential consumers" (Xiaojing and Smith, 2009, p. 935). Google’s “Dear Sophie” ad was able to do this. The TV ad promoted Google Chrome by showing a little girl’s life through the eyes of her father who uses a Gmail account to share his memories with her as she grows up. The other ad debuted by Google in its “The Web is What You Make of It” campaign, featured the “It Gets Better” movement, which makes a stand against the bullying of homosexual youth. Both ads were immediately made viral and well-received by the YouTube community, receiving very high attention and likeability scores (Ace, 2011). These ads were each able to stand out amid the clutter of other advertisements online due to two main factors: one was testing—Google tests their ads before buying TV air time. The second factor was storytelling, or narration. The Google Chrome ads told a heartwarming story first, and sold second (Ace, 2011). Their decisions to do both of these things is supported by previous research, which confirms that “established advertising pre-test measures such as enjoyment, involvement and branding, which predict ability to generate offline TV advertising awareness, can also predict ability to generate viral viewings. In addition, distinctiveness and perceived likelihood to pass along to others are identified as key determinants of viral viewing" (Southgate, 2010, p. 349).

         The aim of this paper is to provide an analyzation of the Google Chrome message campaign “The Web is What You Make of It”, consisting of the ads “Dear Sophie” and “It Gets Better”, using the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM). This model proposes that “consumers develop dynamic knowledge structures about persuasion and draw on this knowledge to identify and cope with other people's attempts to influence them. Persuasion knowledge consists of consumers' beliefs about persuasion, such as determining what a marketer's goals are" (Wentzel, Tomczak, and Herrmann, 2010, p. 513). The model doesn’t imply that comsumers always activate their persuasion knowledge; rather, the activation is dependent on how clear the manipulative intent of the marketer is. When deception is clear, consumers regard the marketer’s claims with greater susipicion, which can lead to resistance to persuasion. Keeping this model in mind, this review will discuss the use of emotional appeals, warmth appeals, and narratives/personal anecdotes as well as how these ads can be improved in the future.

Review of Literature

Emotional Appeals
In the 1980s, there was a "passion turn of semiotics", which stressed how crucial passions and emotions were in texts (Bianchi, 2011). From an advertising point of view, manipulation is not usually possible without some emotional involvement on the part of the subject. Emotions can motivate and persuade consumers, guiding attitudes and behavior. According to previous research, we “often gravitate toward people, products, and brands that connect with us emotionally” (Lau-Gesk and Meyers-Levy, 2009, p. 585), and “emotions act as a gatekeeper to our decision making” (Heath, 2011, p. 118). Google Chrome used this to their advantage in their “Dear Sophie” ad, emphasizing father-daughter love in a way meant to appeal to families. They draw viewers in with images of a first dance recital, a first birthday, and sweet little memories. One thing that makes this commercial stand out is that there is narrator telling you what the product is and how it works, but instead you are actually shown how to use Google Chrome and what types of amazing things it can help you do. This was also used in the “It Gets Better” ad, where Google Chrome pieced together other people’s voices into a video showing how the web can help build community. Again, no narrator was used and the only voices heard in the video were those of real, everyday people coming together for a cause. Going back to “Dear Sophie”, since the father is never actually shown in the ad, it is set up so that that you could be the one in the ad. In “It Gets Better”, you could be the one sharing your voice. This tactic has been used before and many have done research on the idea of “transporting” or aesthesia. “Through aesthesia, namely the ability to perceive or feel sensations, the subject is able to move beyond the ambit of "seeming" and to enter in a transitory way in the realm of "being" and of truth, insofar as this is a sensorial conjunction with the world." (Bianchi, 2011, p. 257). Basically, a viewer is able to see themselves as the person in the video doing the same types of things. As Google Chrome was able to stray away from coming right out and telling consumers to buy their product, it is less likely that a viewer’s persuasion knowledge would be activated. Rather, it is more likely that viewers were touched by the emotional scenes and developed a high opinion of Google Chrome as a brand.

         In general, there are two advertising appeals: rational and emotional. In a rational appeal, the consumer is given information about a product attempting to show that it is the best choice. In an emotional appeal, the marketer attempts to persuade by using good feelings evoked by certain advertising features (Lagerwerf, 2009). Emotional appeals can have either a positive valence (e.g., warmth, love, or friendship) or a negative valence (e.g., guilt, shame, or fear) (Taute, McQuitty, and Sautter, 2011). In “Dear Sophie”, warmth, love, and family all have positive valences. In “It Gets Better”, love and community were positive valences. There is evidence that people process this emotional information and, to an extent, use this to form attitudes and behavioral tendencies (Taute, McQuitty, and Sautter, 2011, p. 39). However, research has also shown that in some instances, people may lack motivation to process the ad carefully and, if the emotion meant to come across is not clear, could lose the meaning. Google Chrome did well with making their commercial stand out from others and allowing viewers to make their own interpretations of it. Using family love as their emotional appeal keeps Google from alienating their audience because it is an emotion the majority of people are familiar with.

Warmth Appeals
         Previous studies have defined warmth as “a positive affective reaction, characterized by a sense of happiness and affection" (Lagerwerf, 2009, p. 13), "an acute, specific, and reactive emotion, changing quickly in response to features of ads" (Abeele and Maclachlan, 1994, p. 587), and "a positive, mild, volatile emotion involving physiological arousal and precipitated by experiencing directly or vicariously a love, family, or friendship relationship" ((Aaker, Stayman, and Hagerty, 1986, p. 366). For the purposes of this analysis, I will use the latter definition depicting warmth as a positive, mild emotion related to a love, family, or friendship relationship. In “Dear Sophie”, warmth was used in both the depiction of a caring, loving relationship between father and daughter, but also in the familiar familial settings: parents playing with their kids, celebrating a child’s first birthday, etc. This is important according to earlier research, which says that “warmth responses can occur as the result of vicarious connection with the social objects portrayed. Presumably, warmth can also be stimulated by viewer empathetic reaction to other elements of the ad such as the music background or familiar settings" (Abeele and Maclachlan, 1994, p. 588). This idea of warmth also came across in “It Gets Better”, where thousands of people came together to share uplifting videos with teens struggling with homosexuality and bullying. This led to a sentimental response from audiences and a strong support group. The warmth factor is commonly associated with these types of commercials which focus on sentimental, friends-feelings, feel-good-about-yourself messages (Aaker, Stayman, and Hagerty, 1986).

         Again, Google Chrome was able to sidestep activating viewers’ persuasion knowledge, mainly because of the sincerity behind the messages they were sharing. Some studies have shown that relationships with brands that seem sincere deepen over time (Bülbül and Menon, 2010). The warm atmosphere created by Google’s ads is more likely to evoke a positive emotional response and lower levels of irritation that ads without warmth appeals (Pelsmacker and Geuens, 1999). As a mild, positive emotion, warmth is set apart from the strong, negative emotions that are often depicted in persuasive commercials, such as fear or anger. This is another quality that helps Chrome’s advertisements stand out among the clutter and helps generate the wide web response.

Narratives and Personal Appeals
         Advertising can take one of two forms: argumentative or narrative. The former provides information in a logical manner, while the latter tells a story (Chingching, 2009). Past research has shown that narrative ads are generally evaluated more favorably than expository, or argumentative ads, because the structure of the ad is similar to the way that information is acquired in daily life (Polyorat, Alden, & Kim, 2007). Marketers seem to be aware of this advantage; a content analysis by Escalas (1998) found that over 20% of ads depict well-developed stories. “Dear Sophie” was a perfect example of a narrative, depicting the sroty of a girl growing up through her father’s eyes. Google’s ad “It Gets Better” was not a perfect storyline, but it still told a story of community coming together and supporting each other. As mentioned previously, there are two things persuasive communication need: transportation, or the idea of “being” in the story, and the viewer’s ability to identify with the characters in the story (Lagerwerf, 2009). Narrative processing is one way to encourage consumers to create meaning and “connect the advertised brand to themselves” (Wentzel, Tomczak, and Herrmann, 2010, p. 511). The familiarity of these stories—being bullied for something or being part of a family—helps draw people in and relate to the narrative being told, thereby connecting them also with the brand. As previous research suggests, “Individuals try to comprehend incoming narrative information by relating it to the prototypes or structures they have previously developed from their personal experiences. Individuals not only generate an understanding of how and why a story evolves; they are also likely to imagine themselves in the same situation or, in other words, engage themselves in mental simulation" (Chingching, 2009, p. 22). This idea is something Google Chrome understood very well and they were able to incorporate it into their ads.

         The importance of engaging the consumers and getting them affectively involved in the ad is that those who are engaged in transportation are less likely “to generate critical thoughts regarding the story” and “are less likely to express negative evaluations of the story characters” (Chingching, 2009, p. 23). When viewers are invested in the story, they are not as likely to avtivate their persuasion knowledge. Here, yet again, Google Chrome did admirably at focusing on the narrative and pulling people into the message, viewing it more as a storyline than a persuasive advertisement. Empathy is one type of emotion Google Chrome is good at eliciting. Empathy can be defined as "an involuntary and un-self-conscious merging with another's feelings" (Chingching, 2009, p. 24). For the Google ads, it was easy to relate to the people featured in the ad and therefore easy to feel what you believed they were feeling. This is a huge thing for an advertisement. The difference between a successful and unsuccessful ad could be how credible the actors are. A viewer is more likely to trust someone they feel they can identify with than an outside source (Moraru, 2011). Another important point to take away from Google Chrome’s use of an indirect appeal—where they use a storyline to show you the product and what it can do instead of telling you to buy something—is that because the appeal is based on emotions, it is hard for viewers to invent counterarguments (Lagerwerf, 2009, p. 19).

Discussion
Overall, the Google Chrome campaign was an impressive success story. They kept the persuasive side of the advertisements to a minimum and really focused on creating a strong narrative to tug at the heartstrings of viewers. They were able to go from a TV-only campaign to a viral campaign that caught like wildfire. As technology develops, this kind of creativity could be the key to further success. One thing to keep in mind with narrative advertising is that if the narrative has an underdeveloped plot ot storyline due to time or space constraints, its possible that viewers will see the ad as not credible and activate their persuasion knowledge, remaining uninfluenced (Chingching, 2009). Another possible drawback to the narrative genre and emotional or warmth appeals is that if the consumer does want factual information, they are likely unable to get that information through a narrative TV commercial which could lead them to tune out and would diminish the effect of the advertisement (Lagerwerf, 2009). One final thing to be wary of when using these types of appeals is the question of ethics. With these types of persuasive messages, even though it is hidden, there is an agenda or underlying purpose behind the ad. You don’t want to be seen as someone using “backdoor” efforts, or someone who uses important emotional issues to simply make a profit (Sciulli and Bebko, 2005).

         In the future, research has shown that the success of television advertising will rely not on its ability to persuade its audience, but how well it is able to influence emotions (Heath, 2011). As most consumers are unable to select or choose which commercials they want to see on TV, it would be easy for viewers to slip into a bored, uninvolved state. Therefore, it will be important to be able to capture their attention and stand out among the other ads as well as try to capture their interest during that low-involvement state. Also, for those people looking for more technical information about a product, it might be in a company’s best interest to use two types of ads in the same campaign: an expository one and a narrative one. While it is unclear if this would have helped Google’s campaign, it is a factor that could influence future advertising.



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