Google Makes A Pre-Holiday Marketing Push For Chromebooks With New Online, Times Square And Best Buy Ad Campaigns

We don’t know much about how successful Google’s Chromebooks really are. Outside of talking about their adoption in schools and businesses, Google has never released any detailed sales figures. Most analysts assume they aren’t exactly a run-away hit. That hasn’t stopped Google from pushing forward with this initiative in the past, though, and this holiday season is no exception. Not only is Google running a massive campaign on Times Square and online, it also looks as if it has secured some prime real estate on Best Buy’s storefront windows.
Google’s “For Everyone” campaign includes an online component at galleryforeveryone.com, where users can upload their own images with a short message about who Chromebooks are for. A selection of these images and texts is then shown online and on billboards on Times Square, which is becoming an increasingly popular venue to highlight new tech products. Just like Google, Microsoft featured a Windows 8 booth in the middle of Times Square earlier this month and also rented out a number of billboards. Only Google, however, got somebody to propose to his girlfriend using its hybrid online/offline campaign.
Google’s intent here is clearly to make Chromebooks more of a mainstream product and it makes sense that it is also enlisting the help of Best Buy, the U.S.’s last major brick and mortar electronics retailer. Best Buy has been featuring various Chromebook displays for a while now, but as Google+ user Clayton Pritchard noted earlier this morning, some Best Buy’s now also feature massive “For Everyone” Chromebook ads on their storefront windows.
Specifically, Google is highlighting the new $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook in these ads. Despite mostly positive reviews, it’s not clear that mainstream users are all that interested in Google’s Chrome OS-based laptops. The company clearly believes in the product, though, and isn’t likely to pull the plug in this experiment anytime soon. Most kids, however, would rather get an iPad for Christmas than a Chromebook.