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Google+ Holiday Commercials With The Muppets

Barry Schwartz on December 27, 2011 at 1:58 pm

Over the holiday break, Google did some serious traditional TV advertising to help promote Google+.

CNet said this showed how desperate Google is to get people onto their social network – that they would go this far to promote the social networking site.

As Steven Levy writes, despite Google using traditional advertising means, they still do it in an untraditional way. In one of the holiday commercials, they features The Muppets participating in a Google+ Hangout.

The use of the Muppets in this commercial goes deeper than using likable characters that people can relate to. It goes back to Craig Silverstein, Google’s first employee, starting a newsgroup for the muppets. It goes back to Google featuring Google Doodles for them and much of the internal culture within the company around Muppet history and humor.

In any event, despite many saying that Google+ is failing to attract the mainstream and Google has to use non-‘Googley’ methods to attract users to Google+ – Google does the ‘traditional’ – sometimes – in a non-traditional way.

Here are those two Google+ commercials from the holidays:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.