What better outcome could Google have asked for than its product helping someone find his long lost family. Saroo was only 5 years old when he fell asleep in a train station and became lost. Years later after being adopted by an Australian family he used Google Earth to map out where he was and eventually found his mother in the village where he was from. He wrote an autobiography which was then created into a movie that stars Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel called Lion.
This incredible story is a great advertisement for Google and its services. Google now has a video on YouTube that complements the movie with Saroo explaining the process of finding his mother. It also has a video of an interview between an employee at Google, Saroo, Dev Patel, and Luke Davies. This whole story is a great promotional and marketing tool because the service was strong enough to help a man find and recognize a train station from 25 years ago.
I do not think this would be considered product placement but I think it is close. Google Earth was actually used and Google helped the movie use the correct version used by Saroo in real life. It is interesting to see an actual product being used because most product placement is very obvious and over-acts the use of the product. The movie should be proud because it showed a product being used without over-acting its use.
No comments:
Post a Comment