Google made headlines this week by beginning a television ad campaign pushing its Chrome browser. But I don't think the ads are going to help the company with its intended goal. For example, here's one, known as "Dear Sophie." It features a father sharing memories with his daughter through a special e-mail account, and ends with the tagline, "the web is what you make of it."

The thing is, as Google well knows, most people don't know what a browser is. In 2009, Google made a video illustrating just that. According to the video, less than 8 percent of the people who were interviewed on that day knew what a browser was—most confused it with a search engine.

Google's ad campaigns are adorable and emotional, but they're not always clear. The Dear Sophie ad strikes me as an ad for e-mail, because that's the main product being used in the ad. If users see the ad and visit the URL it gives at the end, I think they'll be confused to wind up on a landing page for something other than Gmail.

The problem is that the browser is the gateway to the Internet. It's easy for people to know what they do online—send e-mail, search, whatever. It's hard for them to pay attention to how they got there.

Even if people figure out what a browser is, it's hard to get them to care enough about it to be willing to change. The New York Times quotes Harvard professor David B. Yoffie:

"Microsoft does adequately well for the vast majority of consumers," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who has written books about competition among Internet businesses.

"The problem for both Firefox and Chrome is how are they going to convince customers that they have a significantly better product, worth the hassle of actually going and downloading something that's new and different."

So why does Google care about this so much? The company talked a lot about using Chrome to push other browser makers into better products, but now it's working hard to sell people on its specific browser. Thomas Claburn of Information Week, writes:

Chrome users are great for Google because, as Google SVP of commerce and local Jeff Huber put it in the company's Q1 2011 earnings conference call in April, "Chrome users are very valuable to Google." Huber said Google is investing in Chrome marketing and the payoff is worth it. "We have over 120 million daily users [of Chrome], over 40% of whom we added in the past year as a result of our marketing efforts," he said. ...

Chrome does not imprison users--one can use competing browsers while Chrome is installed--but it does open a window onto the Web that's free of competitive distractions. And it creates a barrier to exit, in that habits keep users coming back to the same software rather than making the effort to change.

Despite Google's uphill battle, it is gaining ground. Ars Technica's Peter Bright calls Chrome "the only browser to show consistent any growth these days." He writes:

Both Microsoft and Mozilla will be disappointed to learn that so far, nothing much has changed. Internet Explorer is down yet again, dropping 0.81 points to 55.11 percent. Firefox experienced a small drop of 0.17 points, to 21.63 percent. Chrome was up 0.37 points to 11.94 percent, and Safari was up 0.54 points to 7.15 percent. The implication from this is that the new browsers, though both substantial upgrades over their predecessors, are doing little to attract users of other browsers; the people switching to them are merely upgraders.

Amazon's new ad-supported Kindle, called Kindle with Special Offers, will retail for $114, or $25 less than Amazon's Wi-Fi only Kindle. The company says:

Special offers and sponsored screensavers display on the Kindle screensaver and on the bottom of the home screen—they don't interrupt reading.

However, some wonder why the price cut isn't more generous. Dan Costa writes:

Why $114 and not, say, the market-killing $99? Amazon hinted at reasons in our meeting, but basically it said that Kindle sales have been very price sensitive. Reducing the price to $139 lead to a huge spike in sales. A $25 price cut should be enough to do the same. Plus, I think it needs to save a big announcement for the holiday season. It isn't likely we will see another Kindle this year—at least not an E Ink-based reader, so a big price cut in the fall would be just the thing to make the Kindle the hot gift this holiday season. Again.

Dan Frommer notes that, though $25 may not seem like much of a discount, it could still take time for Amazon to recover that money:

Will Amazon eventually be able to sell enough ads and deliver enough impressions to make the subsidy more than $25? (About 2,500 impressions per device at $10 per 1,000 impressions. If you see an average 10 ads per day, that's still 250 days of use at that ad rate before Amazon breaks even on the $25 savings.)

Amazon's move is particularly interesting since it's the sort of thing people have been expecting from Google's Chrome netbook or similar devices. Mobile analyst Chetan Sharma noted:

While Google is focused on Facebook, Amazon is coming in from left flank. Beautiful.

The Kindle was already an example of sponsored connectivity--a trend I've previously covered. If it come to include even more sponsorship, that model could become the way of the future, argues Jason Gallagher:

Amazon should be credited for finding a way to slide another source of revenue into the world of the Kindle. The revenue generated from the ads, let alone if anyone actually clicks on them, should more than cover the $25 discount per unit. Plus, Amazon is appealing to the deal hunter in everyone. This practice goes along with the reason why companies like Groupon are so successful; they offer deals that are actually useful (at least once in a while).

The real amazing part is that no other company put this together sooner. If Amazon and the Kindle with Special Offers are successful, there is little doubt other companies with mobile devices could follow suit.

The Guild may be the most famous TV show that's never been on TV. In 2007, Felicia Day, known for her role in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, began work on what they intended to be a TV pilot for a series about online gaming. When Hollywood executives didn't understand the jokes, she joined forces with producer Kim Evey and took it to the Web, posting brief monthly episodes and funding filming from her own pocket and fan donations.

Now that the Guild's fifth season is soon to launch, it's widely considered a shining example of DIY video success. Day went on from the first season's initial success to refuse to sell the show. Instead, she forged an unusual sponsorship deal with Microsoft and Sprint. The deal gives Day full creative control over her show, simply requiring that episodes premiere on Microsoft's video properties: the Xbox Live Marketplace, the Zune Marketplace, and MSN Video.


The Guild currently has more than 60 million upload views on its YouTube channel, and that does not include statistics on DVDs sold, or episodes watched through Xbox Live and other key distribution channels.

Speaking in a keynote interview yesterday at South by Southwest Interactive, a Web conference in Austin, Texas, Day argued that her show could represent the future of brand sponsorship.

"Why pay $300,000 for an ad that people are going to avoid watching?" she said, referring to technologies such as Tivo that allow people to bypass television ads. Why not, Day said, spend half that or a quarter of that to fund a Web series, which will provide quality content that people care about, and has the potential to expand to other media? (The Guild has expanded with a comic book deal from Dark Horse).

"I do believe that people think differently about [Microsoft and Sprint] because of The Guild," Day said.

The obvious danger is that a sponsored Web series could be perceived as an extended ad. "That's the problem," Day acknowledged. However, she believes that if brands find content that has a natural synergy with them and trust the creators to produce quality episodes, such a deal could be a much better investment than traditional advertising.

Day said, "Going in that direction is the more risky but the more long-term play."