Google has flexed its muscles on the advertising stage, abandoning all talk of accountability and ROI, by running a 52-second commercial during the Super Bowl yesterday.

$3million dollars for 30 seconds is all but out of reach for most advertisers but its loose change for Google.

So why is Google backing an ad campaign on a platform that its CEO Eric Schmidt famously called a “bastion of unaccountability.”

Martin McNulty, director of online agency Forward3D (disclosure: Speed client), says that this is a bid by Google to understand how marketing channels interact and that Google analysts will be closely watching how the ad impacts search traffic.

“Google is nothing if not experimental. It’s a mistake to view this latest campaign as rearguard,” said McNulty.

“Google wants to control (and integrate) every platform and every possible media and what better way to learn the true potential of the world’s most expensive slot than to buy it,” he said.