SXSW: Google Re-Imagines Advertising

Bringing old commercials into the new with contextual advertising.

Everything old is new again. You've seen it about a million times when it comes to Hollywood, and now Google is pulling up the past to bring us a new advertising campaign based on classic TV commercials.

Google's project Re:Brief takes four commercials from the '60s and '70s that many will remember and re-imagines them to fit in our techy-times.

They found the original ad-men (and women) from the famous "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" Alka-Seltzer commercial, "Drive it like you hate it" from Volvo, "Buy the world a Coke" and Avis ads.

The advertising legends behind these commercials were tasked with taking the basic premise of their commercials and turning them into something more modern for our digital advertising age.

These folks admit they were left in the past while digital advertising took over, so they had quite a task ahead of them. 

Havey Gabor, the man behind the Coke commercial said, "All I know of Google is the search engine."

He adds he uses it "to look up all my aches and pains and what disease I think I probably have and I'm gonna die from."

During SXSW in Austin this year, the Google team said the Coke ad will involve video messages that people will be able to create, and will be shown to people across the world on special vending machines. The idea is to bring people together around the planet.

They found a person with millions of miles on his Volvo for that portion of the campaign, and there will be several webisodes following "Ralph's" life from the Alka-Selzter commercial, which will give us some insight as to why he "ate the whole thing."  

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