Google Spaces Internet Cafe At London Heathrow & Google Featured In UK TV Ads

Via Google Blogoscoped,

Google turns Heathrow into testing lab from ZDNet covers Google opening a
"Google Space" internet cafe at London’s Heathrow airport, plus Google’s been
showing up in UK TV ads in conjunction with T-Mobile.

The Google Space cafe is open through December 19. Two Google employees will
be on hand to help people use 10 laptops and discover Google products. Not sure
what happens if they pop in and prefer to check Yahoo Mail instead!

A new Google Space page at
the Google web site has official information and all the look and feel of
another Google promotional campaign we wrote about earlier, Google College Life.

First a special College
life, powered by Google page was
spotted. Then
it turned out that this page was the end destination for
Google ads
running in college newspapers.

So when the Google Space page talks about "You may have heard about our
Google Space project at London’s Heathrow Airport in Terminal 1," it makes me
think that somewhere, Google’s probably running an ad campaign for this that
hasn’t yet surfaced.

That leads me to those TV ads. I first saw them about two weeks ago. They’re
pitching T-Mobile’s Web ‘n’ Walk
service,
but Google is the starring player.

First it’s girl meets boy:

Then girl spots boy’s name
(or an author he’s reading, it’s not really clear):

So girl runs to the loo where she:

Googles the boy (or the author)

The she runs back and they have a happy conversation because she either found
nothing bad about the boy or found something to talk about (the author he’s
reading).

I asked Google two weeks ago if they were paying for some of these ads (I’ve
also seen print versions in the Daily Telegraph here), but I haven’t yet gotten
an answer. Fair to say, T-Mobile is not making a big deal of Google in these ads
unless some type of arrangement has been reached.

Postscript: Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped reminds me that this ad
already aired on German TV as he’s
written.

Postscript 2: Gary finds this BBC article,
Google extends
searching offline, that also talks about the program and quotes Google
discussing it. Google’s European director of marketing talks about how they see
the area as a "huge focus group" and how all of Google’s products all "comes
back to our core DNA of search." Yep, helping people put banner ads on web pages
(Google AdSense), helping them put ads in print publications (Google
Publication Ads), helping them blog (Blogger), helping them do instant
messaging (Google Talk), all that’s pretty core to search — not. But to be
fair, none of these non-search activities appear to be mentioned in the Google
Spaces area.