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While most of us have been yearning for a return to the 1990s-era economy, an Internet company advertising its products on television was not the sign we had in mind.
Yet that is what TV viewers who still watch commercials will get to see this weekend, according to news accounts -- and the advertiser is none other than Web 2.0 giant Google (Nasdaq: GOOG).
The company is planning to advertise Chrome, the open source browser it launched last year, on television.
Pure Web 2.0?
The point of the advertising will be to compare Chrome's speed and other attributes against established browsers -- primarily Internet Explorer, but also Safari.
"I think what Google hopes to accomplish is attract people who are unhappy with Internet Explorer and aren't already using Firefox," Simeon Spearman, futurist with Social Technologies, told the E-Commerce Times. Chrome's performance is similar to that of Firefox, he said -- besides which, people who use Firefox are probably already aware of and have tested Chrome.
The move may seem surprising to some who view Google as pure in its embrace of all things Web 2.0. It would, according to this assumption, stick with placing ads on Web sites -- which, after all, is its own business model.
However, the challenges Google is facing as it tries to make inroads in the browser market are likely large enough that offline exposure is necessary, Spearman said.
"That is life when you are pushing a Web browser without a convenient way to bundle it," he remarked.
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) leveraged iTunes to promote its Safari browser, for instance. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has its own storied history of bundling IE with other products, like Windows.
The fact that it is advertising on television is also indicative of
how seriously Google is eying the browser market, Scott Testa, a
marketing 
professor at St. Joseph's University, told the E-Commerce Times.
Market Share Wars
Right now Chrome's market share is minuscule, he noted, "but if Google is buying television time, that must mean it views the browser market as an important battleground."
Of course, much would need to happen before Google could elbow IE aside. Chrome's strength is in its speed and ability to juggle multiple open tabs. It still has many glitches in its system, though.
Also, there are the usual privacy concerns when it comes to Google; with Chrome, they center on its OmniBox address and search bar combo, which can track user keystrokes.
For whatever reason, Chrome has rarely broken out of the 0.1 percent share of browser users, according to online stats. Indeed, its peak user share of 1.16 percent, according to NetApplications, dropped after several months post-launch, when the early experimenters went back to other browsers.
So, while Google's apparent hopes that Chrome will become a significant player in the browser market are far off, at best, they are not out of the realm of reasonable expectations.
Microsoft appears to have similar expectations or fears: It does not want the European Commission to require it to bundle Chrome with Windows, on the grounds that it could give Google a monopoly over the Internet.
TV Still a Force
Finally, the advertising play is indicative of the persistent strength of television advertising, which has suffered a number of body blows of late, from the recession to the increasing availability of a myriad of other forms of content delivery systems.
The Internet, of course, has played a major role in reversing the fortunes of TV, which is why Google's Chrome advertising strategy is a rich irony, according to Rob Frankel, author of The Revenge of Brand X"
"Don't look now, but Google's TV venture is a nod to the fact that TV is still the king of media," he told the E-Commerce Times. "It's faster, broader and way more powerful than online; a fact that "gosh-we're-so-hip" online fashionistas would rather play down."
Clearly, Google knows that TV is the engine to drive its message this
time around, Frankel concluded.
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