By Troy Newman
Although it was no game changer I believe the best family-friendly and cutting-edge Super Bowl commercial was done by Google. The Tim Tebow ad was good but like many things Super Bowl related, it didn’t live up to all the pre-game hype. Its message was so subtle that many may have missed the point.
All good advertising must mirror everyday circumstances. And who hasn’t used Google to make travel plans, find restaurants, or define an unknown word? But Google’s ad went a step further than just random searches; it told a love story that surprised me by its overt pro-life message.
Watch the ad below.
With the popular Google search engine as the sole backdrop to the story, a man looks to Paris as place to go to school, and by way of an Internet search, he finds a café near the famous Louvre. A French girl tells him he is cute, but of course the expression of amore must first be sent through Google for the English conversion. But the language of love is not lost in translation.
After a quick Internet search for chocolates and poetry, the long distance relationship culminates with wedding in a French church – yes church!
But wait! There’s more.
After a proper courtship, and a Christian wedding, the Internet surfer looks for a way to assemble a baby crib, and the commercial ends with the quick cooing of a newborn baby.
Earth shattering? Ground-breaking?
Not hardly. But that is what I liked about it. Google was not trying to forge a new path of morality for the world. It wasn’t two openly gay parakeets seeking a sordid love triangle with a mutant osprey. There was no wardrobe malfunction. There was no controversy. The ad reflected reality for most of the world. Two kids fall in love, get married, and have a baby.
Yet Focus on the Family was a target of endless (and baseless) hysteria from the National Organization of Woman and all other the militant pro-abortion, pro-gay groups. Perhaps there was a grand conspiracy by Focus on the Family to draw the collective fire on the pro-life Tim Tebow ad, then do a quarterback-sneak and pass the ball off to Google.
Or maybe not.
I think the Google ad is borne of a society that is tired of pushing the morality envelope and echoes the desire of most people for life to be normal and without the leftist drama. Boys and girls will fall in love, get married, and have a baby, which is the way God designed it.
And what could be more pro-life than that?
