Unless you’ve been walking around the UK with your eyes closed for the last month you will probably have seen a Google Chrome advert on a billboard somewhere. Well, you may not have known that is what you’re looking at but it’s very likely you have passed one by. That’s my point though….these billboards don’t make sense to me…but I’ll get back to that in a minute. First of all, hats off to Google for taking the browser battle to the street. When I first saw their wrap around my morning edition of the Metro paper here in London I thought “damn them”….then I thought “that’s smart…I wish we’d done that”. They’ve really gone big with the Chrome adverts and the takeover of the LCD screens on some escalator routes on the London Underground has been particularly impressive. Has it translated in to market share? I dunno….but I would think the product recognition is up. Impressive stuff Google.
Back to those billboards though. Many of these things are situated alongside busy roads. I noticed one last week in Liverpool almost hidden alongside the very busy A41. You rarely if ever see stopped traffic on that route and the same is true for many of the other locations I have seen these billboards. What is my point? Well it’s one I have had with a few billboards over the last year – the have either too much information to ever be read by a passing car, or here in the case of the Google ads, the message is actually too hard to see for a passing motorist. Sure, the Chrome logo is huge, bright en eye catching but the accompanying text is small and looks almost washed out against the bright white. Here is a good example. The text below the Chrome by Google part says “a fast, new browser, made for everyone" and bottom left is the URL for the browser. Far be it from me to question Google’s advertising capability but I’m surprised this one didn’t get rejected. Eye catching – yes. Delivers a clear call to action…hmmm. Even when you see a huge example they just seem to be too subtle to me.
Designers/copywriters/billboard nerds please feel free to rip my argument apart. Below are a couple of examples and then one that DOES really work. The last image is one of the ads running at train stations where people do have time to stop, stare and read. I read two of these myself at Piccadilly Circus recently and left smiling at the good humour. Taking my own point, those ads aren’t going to work roadside of course but I can’t help thinking that if I were Google, I’d issue a v2 of these billboards with much bigger text and less of the logo. Who knows, maybe that’s exactly what they will do.
image credit: armchaircritic
image credit: Mr Ubuntu
image credit: dreampics
Lots more billboard photos on Flickr
having listened to Margaret Calvert (one of the team of five people who deisgned all the UK road signs we see today) on last nights episode of Top Gear I, and I'm sure Margaret also, totally agree that the Google's agency have made an error in terms of the text size.
And it's a very odd mistake from a company that prides itself on the clear text and massess of white space on their webpage.
There's one of those billboards at Tilehurst Station.
Facing the fast lines and completely unreadable from anywhere anybody would actually be standing.
The fact that you (and others) wrote about it means that the ads work qute well :)
They took it to the street, you took it back to the Internet, like a trojan horse :D
Not necessarily down to these ads but it seems that Chrome's share of the worldwide market increased from 3.9% to 4.6% of usage in December surpassing Safari.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10423733-264.html
Google's insistence that their image be clean and simple here may be pathological, although the same campaign may have worked well for bus stops (where I haven't seen any weirdly).
I just can't see anybody caring enough about "a browser" or wondering what it is to go and try it. Perhaps that's just me I generally read it as "A new browser (to spy) on everyone"... we all know it's true.