Yesterday I happened to be waiting on a tube platform with a non-technical person, and we were opposite one of those new Google Chrome ads, as pictured here.
I’ve seen a few people comment that they didn’t think that a non-technical person would understand what they were all about, so I took the opportunity to ask my friend about it.
“See that ad over there? What do you think it’s for?”
“It looks like it’s for a search thing. A new kind of web search thing. That’s a big list of related things to what they searched for”
“What do you think Google Chrome is then?”
“Well it says on it, a new browser. That’s what you use to search isn’t it?”
“What other browsers are there then?”
“Well there’s the Yahoo! one, and then there’s the Google one.”
So to the extent that she even noticed the ad, she assumed it was just something to do with Google’s search engine, because of the search implications and prior meaning of the brand “Google”.
I don’t think this proves anything, but it was interesting hearing another point of view.
Google seem to have too much money for their own good on this campaign, as you rightly state that not too many non-technical people know the difference between a search engine and browser.
A far better advertisement would ‘feature’ IE6 and show the better path (and show firefox).
I guess they are going for the maximum exposure might make people visit the web address. It’s not just the tube where these ad’s are posted, you can’t move in the UK for billboards with them on.