100 Days of Pop: Episode 13 Home Alone Returns!
Hello, and happy new year you filthy animals, Today on the Pop 100 we’re talking Google Home’s nostalgia-soaked Molotov cocktail Home Alone commercial.
While everyone was arguing whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas Movie (it is), Google dropped the biggest Pop-Marketing bomb of the year, ringing out like a giant Christmas gong through the internet of Christmas past.
You see ..sometimes, sometimes the pop-marketing stars align and this year, they did on Dec 19th when Macaulay Culkin reprised his role as a now 38-year-old Kevin Lannister in an advertisement for Google Home.
If you haven’t yet peeped the 60-second ad, then what kind of human are you? It sent a ripple through the internet that even those with flip phones could feel.
It’s pop-marketing because it utilizes contextual pop-culture icons (Home Alone) to deliver really specific and potentially boring product features (brand marketing) Google Home.
But you knew that- the question is why? Why does this commercial make a good portion of the US’s hearts grow at least 1 size larger no matter how much of a scrooge they are?
It’s all in the power of DELAYED NOSTALGIA.
Ok, so you know what nostalgia is- It’s a surprisingly powerful sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place w/ happy personal associations.
It’s also a pillar in pop-marketing and it’s a really useful tool for brands when used correctly, and in this case, it was wielded like a master craftsman.
Not only did Google use the return of KM, now as a 38-year-old man still living in his parents home, but they recreated specific and iconic scenes from the movie, inserting Google home products throughout, showing how much easier it is to be Ninja Kev in 2018.
One side note is how Google uses nostalgia to show how far we’ve come in technology since 1990- a trick that Apple is fairly famous for.
But it’s more than just nostalgia. There’s something about the time in-between. The delay in the return- Delayed Nostalgia.
I think maybe nostalgic icons hold a kind of fuel in culture and when it comes to nostalgia, the more time between when your favorable memories were first created in our heads and the next time we come across them in our lives can have a kind of multiplying effect on the impact it makes on culture.
Like a rubber band or a slingshot more you hold back, the more Nostalgia fuel builds up and the further the idea sails once it’s finally released.
We saw this w/ the most recent Star Wars trilogy, seeing our heroes reprise the roles that made them iconic in our mind- Luke, Han Solo, Princess Leia the Millennium Falcon. JJ ABRAMS knew this would be a key part wooing a somewhat hesitant audience back in the fold and he knew just how to play those chords.
On the other hand, you have the terminator series- It really never got a chance to build up steam before someone else would put out a new movie or a new tv series that the energy of even the return of Schwarzenegger didn’t have the heat that it should have.
Now as for, Home Alone, it's is a really rare example of a pop-culture icon that had a ton of built up nostalgia fuel because nobody had ever thought to bring back KM but because until this year that was fucking impossible. It was held back, not because people didn’t want to see it but because MC wanted nothing to do with it, no matter what the paycheck.
I mean it would have happened on the 20th anniversary or when MC turned 21- Right?
Turns out the Christmas movie that made our childhoods so warm and fuzzy turned out to be quite the opposite for MC, in which the popularity of Home Alone and then Home Alone 2: Lost in New York caused an extreme amount of grief in MC’s youth, causing him to divorce his parents at 16 and even leaving the country for Paris in his 20s to escape his past. And at the same time, HA left MC w/ enough FU money to not have ANY real need to revisit the HA world.
So time keeps going and nostalgia keeps building and finally in middle age MC accepts his fate as the Home Alone kid and Google offers enough of a paycheck probably millions if not 10s of millions to bring him back and presto, just like that we have a NOSTALGIA THERMO NUCLEAR BLAST with 30 years of power behind it.
Delayed Nostalgia- pretty cool.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it. The production of it was amazing the link the product was poetic but think about this- They released it on Dec 19- That’s a shelf life of EXACTLY 6 days until this thing is 100% dead forever in the black hole of irrelevant. They can’t play it on Jan 1, they can’t play it next Christmas- It’s over.
And what does that tell you about Google’s goals with this content? It’s certainly not Google Home instant sales because shit, it would have come out for Black Friday- Maybe last-minute shoppers focused, but maybe, maybe it was just to gobble up a ton of attention away from Alexa this year during holiday gatherings? And I think that would be very smart indeed. Oh Amazon, Google totally zinged you on this one. This one should have been yours 🙂
And also I’d say MC is also pushing a comedy podcast and I’m sure he understands how pop-marketing works- He gets some cash and gets shoved into the world’s view for the holidays, giving his own brand a nice charge before the new year.
Make sure and hit up my website at pop-marketer.com and sign up for my newsletter, The Weekly Zeitgeist to check out all the pop-marketing news out there.
Happy New Years true believers. Whatever it is that you want to accomplish this year, go out there and make it happen.
I mean it would have happened on the 20th anniversary or when MC turned 21- Right?
Turns out the Christmas movie that made our childhoods so warm and fuzzy turned out to be quite the opposite for MC, in which the popularity of Home Alone and then Home Alone 2: Lost in New York caused an extreme amount of grief in MC’s youth, causing him to divorce his parents at 16 and even leaving the country for Paris in his 20s to escape his past. And at the same time HA left MC w/ enough FU money to not have ANY real need to revisit the HA world.
So time keeps going and nostalgia keeps building and finally in middle age MC accepts his fate as the Home Alone kid and Google offers enough of a paycheck probably millions if not 10s of millions to bring him back and presto, just like that we have a NOSTALGIA THERMO NUCLEAR BLAST with 30 years of power behind it.
Delayed Nostalgia- pretty cool.
Of course there’s a lot more to it. The production of it was amazing the link the product was poetic, but think about this- They released it on Dec 19- That’s a shelf life of EXACTLY 6 days until this thing is 100% dead forever in the black hole of irrelevant. They can’t play it on Jan 1, they can’t play it next Christmas- It’s over.
And what does that tell you about Google’s goals with this content? It’s certainly not Google Home instant sales because shit, it would have come out for Black Friday- Maybe last minute shoppers focused, but maybe, maybe it was just to gobble up a ton of attention away from Alexa this year during holiday gatherings? And I think that would be very smart indeed. Oh Amazon, Google totally zinged you on this one. This one should have been yours 🙂