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What's new @ Google? Tips and tools for agencies
Google@ Cannes: Project Re: Brief Premiere, the Google+ "Winners Circle" and More
Friday, June 22, 2012
Last week, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the global advertising community gathered to celebrate and honor the most inspiring creative work from around the world. We are committed to working with our agency partners to enable and inspire this continued creative magic. Below are a few initiatives and projects that we discussed last week, designed to do just that:
Project Re: Brief, the film:
Earlier this year, we kicked off
Project Re: Brief
, our new experiment to re-imagine the future of advertising by taking some cues from its storied past. We’ve brought four of the most loved campaigns of the ‘60s and ‘70s -- Coca-Cola’s “Hilltop,” Volvo’s “Drive it like you hate it,” Avis’ “We try harder,” and Alka-Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” -- back to life, this time built from the ground up for the digital age, with the partnership of the the advertising legends that originated them. But we think the ads themselves are only part of the story. Behind the scenes of our “Project,” we saw an amazing journey unfold as traditional, classically trained advertising creatives came together with technologists for the first time to collectively push the bounds of what online advertising can be. This journey is captured in “
Project Re: Brief: A Film About Re-Imagining Advertising
,” which we premiered at Cannes, and made widely available today on
YouTube
.
The Google+ Winners Circle:
In the same spirit of helping share inspiration from some of the world’s best advertising creatives, we're also creating the
Google+ “Winners Circle.”
This will be a new circle of 50 of the industry’s most honored creatives so that everyone in the industry can meet the people behind the amazing work we’re here to celebrate and see what makes them tick.
Agency Edge
, our
refreshed training platform for agencies
: One of the top requests we get from our agency partners is for more tips and training to help get the most out of the web’s myriad of marketing tools. We initially addressed this several years ago with the launch of
AgencyLand
, an educational platform designed specifically for our agency partners. But in the years since, the agency landscape, the range of tools available and in fact, the entire ecosystem, have shifted dramatically. So to meet the new and quickly evolving needs of today’s agencies, we unveiled
Agency Edge
, a place where agencies can get on-demand training, collateral and benchmark data to better serve their clients.
Cannes is one of my favorite events of the year, precisely because of the amazing mix of innovation and creativity on display. We think, though, that even more dazzling projects lay just over the horizon. Through initiatives like these, we hope to help bring them into view.
Posted by Torrence Boone, Managing Director, Agency Business Development
Re-imagining classic ads for the mobile age
Thursday, June 14, 2012
It’s no secret that users are spending more and
more time on their mobile and tablet devices
, and the trend will continue to scale.
Mobile devices
drive 10% of total Internet traffic, up from 4% just 18 months ago, and an astounding 29% of U.S. adults now have a tablet or e-reader -- up from 2% three years ago. This opens up many new opportunities for advertisers to connect with consumers. However, with this new opportunity comes new challenges to create rich ad experiences that engage and delight viewers; experiences that leverage unique features of the devices and environment in which they’re seen.
To see what mobile ads of tomorrow will look like, we’ve re-imagined four iconic ads from the 1960s and 70s in Project Re: Brief, an experiment we
launched earlier this year
. Today we’re releasing the
Android app for Project Re: Brief
, which lets you play with these new ads on your phone and tablet devices. Built on the latest platform for
mobile rich media
, these ads try to push the boundaries of what can be done with today’s technology.
Coca-Cola
:
“I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” (mobile ad)
The mobile ad lets you send a free Coke with a text message to a stranger across the world, who can receive it on special vending machines. The recipient can then record a message from the machine and send it right back to your phone. The ad uses the phone’s GPS location to show a customized video of your message flying through clouds, Google Maps and StreetView images.
Volvo
:
“Drive it like you hate it.” (tablet ad)
This ad lets you follow the
unique story of Irv Gordon
, a loyal Volvo owner who's on his way to putting three million miles on his 1966 P1800s. You can watch relevant videos and hear audio clips about stories from his journey so far, follow his Google+ feed, see his mileage and location in real-time, and explore features of the latest Volvo cars. The ad shows different copy and video based on the tablet app in which it is seen. Simply swipe the screen left or right to see how the ad behaves in different apps.
Alka-Seltzer
:
“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” (mobile ad)
You can follow Ralph on the day “he ate the whole thing” through a series of 1970’s sitcom-like episodes that are customized to the viewer based on the device, app, time, weather and location. From the ad settings menu, you can select various options to see how a video might be customized to a viewer based on this information. Then, simply tap the display ad to launch the customized video.
Avis
:
“We try harder.” (tablet ad)
A user can write about his or her experiences with Avis rental cars in natural language, i.e. spoken English, provide some details about the rental car, and within seconds, his or her story is turned into a one-of-a-kind film, which can be shared on the web - all within the ad. The pre-roll animation of the ad changes based on the app. Swipe the screen left or right to see how the animation varies in different apps.
If you don’t have an Android device, you can play with the desktop versions of these ads on
projectrebrief.com
, and watch videos of the mobile versions. We’re also working hard on an app for your iOS devices.
These are just some examples of what can be done with mobile ads, when you marry big creative ideas with the latest technology platforms. We hope they inspire the advertising community to create even more beautiful mobile experiences.
Posted by Aman Govil, Product Marketing Manager, Display Marketing
Project Re: Brief Continued...
Monday, April 16, 2012
Several weeks ago, we introduced
Project Re: Brief
, an experiment to re-imagine some of America’s most iconic ads for the modern web. Today, we’re happy to unveil the two newest pieces, re-imagined ads for Alka-Seltzer and Avis, along with short films that give you a behind-the-scenes look at the history of the old ads, and how the new ads came together.
Alka-Seltzer:
“
I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.
”, 1972
Art Director: Bob Pasqualina, Copywriter: Howie Cohen
Howie and Bob’s original commercial depicted a heartburn stricken, middle-aged man, who said a memorable line - “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing;" the line and Ralph instantly became a part of popular culture in America.
In 2012, the
re-imagined display
and
mobile
ads bring back Ralph and his famous line, via 1970s sitcom-style episodes that tell the story of “The day Ralph ate the whole thing.” Told over breakfast, lunch and dinner, each episode leads up to the iconic moment captured in the original ad. Videos in each ad experience change based on the location, audience, time of day and other factors. Each episode also provides users unique ways to interact with Ralph, and influence the story. Watch this short film about Bob and Howie recreating their most iconic work.
The tech
behind the Alka-Seltzer ad:
To give each viewer a different experience, we've combined ad targeting technologies with dynamic rich media ads to create custom videos on the fly. For example, in the morning, a user sees Ralph’s breakfast incident, while in the evening the dinner story is shown. The location of each episode is tailored to the user’s location through Google’s Street View, while weather data is used to create similar weather conditions to the viewer’s location, including rain and snow. The character roles, jobs and dialogs are all customized, ultimately making the stories more relatable. For example, when the ad is seen on YouTube, Ralph’s TV plays the same video as the user.
Custom interactions allow viewers to influence the story. During the dinner episode, viewers are able to call Ralph’s phone, in real-time, to distract him as he is cooking. While in mobile ads, a user on a smartphone can shake and wake Ralph up, or knock on his window through the accelerometer.
Avis:
“
We try harder.
”, 1962
Copywriter: Paula Green
In 1962, Avis debuted its “We try harder” campaign, written by Paula Green. Avis adopted the phrase as the company’s ethos, and has been using it ever since. The line was based on the insight that when you’re a challenger brand, you have to constantly try harder for every customer and can’t afford to offer anything less than great customer service and a great quality rental vehicle.
In the
re-imagined display
and
tablet
ads a user can write about his or her experiences with Avis rental cars in natural language, i.e. spoken English, and within seconds, his or her story is turned into a one-of-a-kind film, which he or she can share on the web - all within the ad. Every customer’s experience is unique, and so are the stories. Today’s technology enables Avis’s customers to tell the world about those experiences. And you can get behind the scenes with Paula through this short film.
The tech
behind the Avis ad:
For creatives wondering about how this works in the background, the ad uses widely available tools used for building web apps. Built in HTML5 to run on desktop and tablets, the ad relies on popular, open source, natural language processing algorithms to parse and understand what a consumer writes. The stories are classified into themes of various experiences related to renting cars. Themes are based on common scenarios, like returning lost items or upgrading a vehicle, developed using a database of real Avis customer stories, collected over many years. Notes that people enter into the ads are matched with the language from those common themes, thus developing a custom narrative for each story. Animations are composed from overlapping, illustrated sequences to render video frames, and voice clips are stitched together from a pre-recorded database using open source tools, and rendered in the ad.
For more details on the overall project, we invite you to visit
www.projectrebrief.com
. In the meantime, we hope this gives a taste of how the technology of today can help inspire the ad creatives of tomorrow.
A special note of thanks to our creative partners and friends at
Grow Interactive
and
Johannes Leonardo
who helped to bring these ideas to (modern) life.
Posted by Aman Govil, Project Re: Brief Lead
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