“Traditional advertising not dead” says Google.

Well, they’ve not actually said it as such.  It’s just a conclusion that’s extremely easy to come to.

When I’m not forced to suffer the commute to work by the swine flu express I’m cycling to work.  There’s a couple of pretty major billboards by the Clydeside Expressway and I was fairly surprised to see a Google Chrome advert up there this morning in place of the usual Cheryl Cole “you’re worth it”/Davidoff Adventure nonsense that’s usually up there.

Excuse the quality of the image.  It doesn’t get properly light again in Glasgow until mid-March.  What the image does illustrate though is what passing motorists will see, which is not a lot.

Whilst I’m a big fan of the uncluttered element of the Google homepage, this level of minimalism on physical advertising seems a bit short-sighted.

The advert features a mostly blank page with a big Chrome logo and the words “Chrome by Google – A fast, new browser. Made for everyone.”

They wouldn’t be able to make this claim until they had a version of the Mac version of the Chrome Browser ready.  I wonder how long they’ve been sitting on the Mac version just so they could tie it in to their marketing campaign?

More importantly, what’s their thinking behind this ‘real world’ marketing campaign?  They’ve only really attempted it before once, when they promoted  its enterprise office and collaboration suite.  Now the big push is on,  with a pretty significant spend on UK billboard and newspaper marketing and  what they are hoping to achieve is significant market penetration (I hate those words) for Chrome as the operating system.

And they still need traditional forms of advertisting to achieve this.

As the way we search and the way we want need our computers to operate become increasingly linked, there is a pretty hefty battle looming.  With Microsoft already committed to spending over$100million dollars on marketing Bing alone and Windows 7 already past Apple’s OS market share, this latest move from Google is all the more intriguing…

Place your bets…