Google celebrates Father's Day with Unique Twist

Google has paid tribute to dads celebrating Father's Day in a typically touching manner, with one of its famous Google Doodle illustrations of a  pair of formal adult shoes next to children's sneakers on a  Google door mat.

While Father's Day has a long way to go in India into really meaning something to the masses, it is nice to see advertisers like Google taking the lead to making  a special effort on the  day.  Most advertisers turn their gaze towards fathers on this day.  Google which has started a tradition of celebrating every important day during the year on their home page, has produced another poignant father son story in their latest ad.

The India Fathers day ad, works as a nice continuing campaign to the Reunion Ad they released earlier.   The film is titled 'Hero- A Bollywood Story'.  The short film is about a son trying to convince his soon-to-retire father to move with him to Mumbai. However, due to an oath he took when he was young, the father won't go to Mumbai. It seems like the father had dreamt of becoming an actor and had run to Mumbai to pursue this dreams. But just as he was about to get his first break, his own father forced him to come back. So, he came back and took a job in a local cinema theatre. Angered by the frustration of not making it he had vowed never to return to Mumbai.

However, the son is adamant about taking his father to Mumbai with him. So he takes the help of Google search (specifically the voice search functionality), and comes up with a plan to ensure his father gets to live his dream of becoming a Bollywood star.

The son looks for various locations where famous Bollywood films were shot including the likes of Sholay.  When they return from their emotional sojourn, the son has put a movie together of their holiday and adventures of discovering the famous locations of Bollywood movies which gets screened in the local cinema theatre where they live.  

How is it different from the Reunion?   I thought the Reunion was a much more touching story.  Besides, there was the challenge of searching for a shop that produced jhujariya's ( a sweet ) in far away Lahore, a challenge for any search engine. (Looking for Bollywood locations in comparison seems a cinch). The story of two friends uniting after six decades of the India-Pakistan partition, it also had a strong social message both for India and Pakistan and was viewed in both countries.  In comparison, I felt that the google search in the new Fathers day film was simple and not as challenging.   I checked how the Father' s Day film was recieved amongst a few 25 year olds and almost all of them found the theatre sequence a little stretched.  They all felt that the story would have worked as well without that sequence.  Some of the young women who saw the film found the  film too soppy.

 Fathers Day in the United States

A study by University of California-Irvine associate professor of sociology, Kristin Turney, children with an incarcerated parent are more than three times more likely to have behavioral problems or depression, . There are about 2.7 million American children with a parent in prison. Created with non-profit organizations Pops the Club and Place4Grace,  the Father's Day  campaign by Google helps children reach out to their fathers in prison by letting them send a video to their fathers.

Google's philanthropic arm announced earlier this year that it would be focusing on racial justice and would work with organizations fighting against mass incarceration.  The Father's Day effort helped kids send their videos to the fathers who were in jail.

Beneath the Google Brand

Whatever the theme, Google is taking an overarching human emotion that fits in with their image of being one of the worlds most valued brands.  In the Indian films they show how 'search' is making possible  what we could never have dreamt of in everyday life,  in the days before Google.  When you close your eyes, brands like Google have a very strong mental imagery.  Considering its a brand without even a retail store that is a huge achievement.  

But then Google is not a conventional brand. Their mission statement is 'to take the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful' and that theme continues to evolve in interesting ways. The  Father's Day films are a step in the right direction that makes the Google brand larger than life.  Google’s first rule in their “Ten Things” philosophy is to focus on the user experience before anything else.  The Father's Day films grabs that user experience quite uniquely.

They express a moment of captured reality.  Attempts that fail are called 'slice of life' in the advertising man's vocabulary!

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