All aboard!

Google needs to brand itself. For years the search engine has been the main entrance to the Internet, by virtue of being a great product and becoming incredible popular; so much so that the term Google became a verb, a synonym for online search. As big and successful the company turned up to be, it also became invisible, like a commodity service.
But with the advent of Social Media, Google started facing substantial competition. People are now getting access to content on the Internet through peer-to-peer recommendations and mobile apps, negating the exclusive need for Google searches. The search engine stopped being that invisible, almighty entity on the Internet to become another choice in the presence and in contrast to its Social Media competitors. In that context, Google needs to brand itself to compete against new ways of online discovery and to talk about its advantages to users and potential ones. In my opinion, that's why you may bump into one of its ads on a train or on billboards. Once an invisible giant, Google now needs to have a voice and a personality.
The competition is for conquering users who would make sense of the advertising space search engines and social media platforms sell, but ultimately, it's also for converting every single human being into an Internet user, and for that they need to go and look for them where they have always been: on the streets.