In an effort to prove that technology does have a human side

Mar 9, 2012 17:31 GMT  ·  By

It may be easy to forget it, but Google is an ad company. Granted, it's not an ad company in the traditional sense, i.e. one that makes ads, but it's not a media company either, even though most of its revenue comes from running ads.

It's an entirely new beast, one that is revolutionizing advertising as a whole. But that doesn't mean it can't relate to the old school ad companies which, for better or for worse, have come to rely on it.

In an effort to show that advertising is advertising, no matter where it comes from, Google has teamed up with some old school advertisers, creators of four iconic ads from decades past and challenged them to come up with a similar concept to the original ad but adapted to today's technology.

"We started with four iconic ad campaigns from the 1960s and ‘70s from Alka-Seltzer, Avis, Coca-Cola and Volvo, each considered groundbreaking in its day. The advertising legends who made the original ads then came out of retirement to rethink their original 'brief,' this time, using the full range of technological tools at their disposal, to reach consumers in today’s digitally connected world," Google explained.

Google has revealed the new versions for two of the four original ads, the Coca Cola and the Volvo ad. The re-imagined campaigns pull no punches, unsurprisingly, and are quite interesting.

The original Coca Cola ad, for example, had people from all over the world get together in one place in Italy. The new one links people together via vending machines and enables them to buy a Coke for someone across the world and even leave them a video message.

The Volvo ad focused on the car's reliability, "drive it like you hate it" it said. The new campaign focuses on one particular Volvo from that era that has already racked up 2.9 million miles. As it gets closer to 3 million miles, you can keep up with progress in real-time, check out some of the trips it made on Google Maps and even chat with the owner on Google+.