Google has begun a new ad campaign for its enterprise services, but it isn't your typical Google venture—it's going oldschool. Starting today and running for the next four weeks in August, Google will be running a series of billboards—yes, real ones—in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in order to showcase the benefits of "going Google" for business. The hope is that more business owners will ditch managing their own e-mail, calendaring, and doc sharing solutions in favor of Google Apps—especially now that they're out of beta.

For those who want to see the billboards for themselves, they will be placed along Highway 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Highway in New York, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago (and that's why we haven't rushed out to go see it yet), and the Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the billboards will be changed every single weekday for the next month, but you environmentalists in the crowd should worry not—all vinyl used on the billboards will be recycled and turned into either computer bags or shopping bags.

The story being told on the billboards will be about "an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually—you guessed it—goes Google." The billboards direct people to a new page on Google's site, which emphasizes the benefits of Google Apps. The company notes that workers who have "gone Google" don't have to worry about full mailboxes or backing up their data, and that IT managers don't waste time buying, installing, and managing their own e-mail servers. In announcing the new ad campaign, the Internet giant also touted the roster of companies that have already made the switch to Google's services, including Motorola, Genentech, Valeo, and the Washington, DC City Government. It's a message Google wants to drive home to the millions of people stuck in traffic every morning and evening.

The billboard campaign is just the latest move in Google's long-running push into the enterprise. The company finally ditched the "beta" status on many of its Web apps last month, saying that businesses were hesitant to dive into Google Apps that may not be finished. "We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase," Google product management director for enterprise products Matt Glotzbach said at the time.

Many businesses are still hooked on their own solutions, many of which are a cocktail of Office, Outlook, and various other Microsoft offerings. In an attempt to wean admins from Exchange, Google introduced a tool earlier this year allowing IT Managers to migrate from an Exchange server to Google Apps with virtually no change from the end users' perspective. Billboards may not directly win converts to Google's enterprise solutions, but they certainly will raise the company's visibility as a serious alternative to Microsoft in the office.