Alec Brownstein wanted to work at one of the top ad agencies in New York. What’d he do? He bought Google ad words so that when the creative directors from those agencies Googled themselves they got a message from him.
Brilliant.
No spoilers. You’ll have to watch the short video to see what happened.
Come on, you’re as excited as I am by Google Zeitgeist day aren’t you? Google Zeitgeist is where Google digs through “billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.” All of the search queries we studied are anonymous—no personal information was used.”
This year John McCain, Heath Ledger, and the Olympics were out while Michael Jackson, Twitter, and Facebook were in. Interesting how social media services made the top three this year. Also interesting, the Twilight phenomenon knows no bounds, infecting the Fastest Rising Image searches with four spots in the top 10, making the vampires the only fictional characters on the list (unless you count Lady Gaga as fictional).
In local (Minnesota-related) news, you should see how searches for Bret Favre spiked in August, and here’s the Top 10 Searches for Minneapolis:
And if, like me you have no idea what running aces is, it’s a harness racing horse track/poker club near Forest Lake. I had no idea such a place existed until right now. See? Google Zeitgeist is totally educational.
Google has released its Zeitgeist for 2008, which sort of feels like a yearbook for the planet. In the Zeitgeist report, Google tallies up the fastest rising search terms for the year. They define fastest rising as, the most popular searches conducted for 11 months of 2008 and ranked based on how much their frequency increased compared to 2007. Google divvies up the info by country, topic (sports, showbiz, etc.) plus they compile a big grand daddy list of the most popular search terms globally.
The global list had a quite a few surprises on it for me (who knew Heath Ledger was more popular than Obama?) and the US-centric list made me feel woefully inadequate for not knowing who in the heck David Cook was (I know now, thanks Google).
P.S. Did you notice how Goolge is using Pantone’s mimosa, dubbed the color for 2009?
