New Gooooogle branding on AdWords

[David]

Why the heck yould you do that?

You may have noticed that Google have recently changed their branding on AdWords. Previously, each AdWord block was accompanied by a reasonable "Ads by Google" text link. This has now been changed to "Ads by Goooooooooooogle".

Why have they done that? It looks crap and it's just going to piss everyone off. What possible benefit can they get from this? :angry:

I had an email from Google this week and in it they say:

We’re currently running a test with new branding features on Google ads. You may notice some of your pages displaying ‘Ads by Goooooogle’ ad units. We welcome your feedback on this new look, and we’ll be analyzing the results of this test over the next while.

Notice that in this message they include only 6 o's whereas in practice, 12 are used.

Just how much feedback do you think they'll get and will they bother acting on it?

[francis]

I noticed that when I was reading an article on including Google adverts with valid XHTML Strict (http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200409/content_negotiation_adsense_and_comments/) and thought it was weird. Maybe it's based on Fitts' Law (http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/08/19/fitts_law/)? All very strange...

[David]

I do like the Mezzoblue article - makes absolute sense but then to spoil it by using image links rather than text is a bit of a cheat. And sloppy - look at the word "projects" on the global nav. The final "s" is missing its right-hand side. These guys ought to know better.

[Tom]

Goooooooooooogle looks dumb as type but maybe they are trying to get us to say the word as G-oooh-gle (as in 'Ooogh - that's lovely).