To be seen as one of the world's most helpful brands and ultimately drive product usage and lead to a powerful conversation that resonated across India, Google launched "Be Unstoppable."
Objective and Context:
To be seen as one of the world's most helpful brands, Google identified a cause that could help create an inclusive marketing strategy to ultimately drive product usage and lead to an impactful conversation that resonated across India.
Target Audience:
Using Google data, Google applied a demographic filter targeting 105 million users with five key descriptors: Internet, Smartphone, 18-34 ABC, Metros, and Tier 1.
Within this segment, Google identified ways to string together varied audiences under a single narrative, tapping into real user-generated content to add authenticity and relatability. This allowed for its anthemic spot to highlight Google's role in providing inspiration, information, and tools for empowerment.
Creative Strategy:
Despite a population of 1.3 billion, no Indian woman has won an Olympic gold medal. The majority of females in India are not encouraged to pursue individual dreams, let alone sports. Female athletes are missing in the media, and girls lack role models.
Google's creative strategy for its campaign, "Be Unstoppable," was thereby based around sparking change in such thinking. It tapped into emotionally resonant stories that challenge societal norms and reshape society to be more appreciative of everyone's pursuits, irrespective of gender, age, and traditional expectations.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Google decided to use the media hype of the 2020 Olympics to champion the dreams of women and girls in India. With the event around the corner, Google decided to start a conversation. User-generated stories of unsung female athletes were strung with personal Google queries and a hit song, Apna Time Aayega (Our Time Will Come). The traditionally male vocals were sung by a female YouTube creator, making the song a call for all women and girls.
The campaign began with a nationwide search for real, inspiring stories of women and girls pushing the boundaries of sports. The user-generated clips were woven together to create a 60-second call for women and girls to rewrite India's sporting history, with a little help from Google. The campaign was designed to maximize the reach of each hero film among its audience, which was segmented and mapped based on their lifestyles and Google search patterns.
Mobile Execution:
The role of digital media and social media was linked directly to the core objectives of the campaign: to drive advocacy and daily active usage. Google wanted to measure analytics at both a brand metrics and business metrics level. To measure brand effectiveness, Google set up tests on YouTube. To measure the impact on business metrics, the brand set up match market tests, which revealed how the brand campaign added value to product (search) campaigns.
Google selected platforms with higher affinity for the audience (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, OTT, etc.) to maximize reach for the campaign and minimize the spill-over. The brand reached more than 120 million unique audiences through its campaign.
Google designed the campaign in such a way that it delivered each hero film to its specific, intended audience segment by employing different planning tactics.
The global CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, believes in the notion of brand helpfulness, and Google has been actively creating narratives about the inherent helpful nature of its products around the world. "Be Unstoppable" was one of the very first campaigns in India that sought to build helpfulness and hence had an uphill task of finding the right narrative which aligned with the brand purpose of Google.
"Be Unstoppable" was a call for women to rewrite India's sporting history. In just three weeks, the video garnered more than 100 million views, delivering an unprecedented jump of more than 3.8 percent in daily active users.
The campaign achieved an 83 percent brand appeal score for Google in India, shattering the industry benchmark and the campaign objective of 70 percent. Through the mobile channels, the BLS research showed that brand advocacy increased by 3.95 percent.
The campaign had a huge impact in India. Within the first three weeks of its launch, it had reached more than 70 million views on YouTube. This shattered previous performance numbers of Google campaigns in India. The social chatter around the campaign helped propel the campaign to be featured across various digital platforms. The innovative usage of user-generated content helped the campaign to strike a meaningful chord with all viewers.
