The Campaign Google Couldn’t eadRay
Microsoft
Issue 31 | June 2014
Agency
Wunderman London
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Matt Batten Art Director Kousha Forshami Copywriter Oddbjorn Stensrud Senior Designer Ian Saunders Designers Ben Richardson Stephanie Reeves Designer Kevin Guild
Production Team
Managing Partner Stephen Guy Business Director James Latham Account Manager Chloe Lockett Chief Strategy Officer Richard Dunn Strategists Kevin Mercer, Joe Morgan Senior Director/Strategic And Special Projects Paul Stoddart Senior Marcom Manager/ Strategic And Special Projects Shaun Moshay
Other Credits
Senior Project Managers Hayley Ziepe Suzanne Moules Project Director Amy Chalkley Project Manager Capucine Coutou Art Buyer Tom Redican Digital Project Manager Ram Aiyar TV Production Mustard Film Company
Date
December 2013
Background
Microsoft's Outlook.com (the new Hotmail) had the same market share as Google's Gmail. The challenge in the UK was, how could Outlook grow at the expense of its major competitor. The insight was that 98% of Gmail users were unaware that Google read all personal emails sent to or from a Gmail account and used the information to sell ads based on the content of those private conversations – holiday plans, divorce, financial trouble. But Outlook.com did not do this. With privacy being a major issue for consumers, the strategy was to highlight Google's invasion of privacy with a direct response campaign that drove consumers to visit the website, to try Outlook.com and to make a stand.
Idea
In a Gmail test, an email was sent to a friend to ask advice on which car to buy. Google read the email and served ads for cars, dealers and finance. But when the exact same email was written in Pig Latin, Google served random ads for stationery and pet food. Google couldn't read Pig Latin – the silly children's language popular in Britain in which kids move the first letter of a word to the end of the word and add 'ay', eg. cat becomes atcay, private becomes ivatepray and directory becomes irectoryday.
An entire campaign was created in print, digital, radio and TV using Pig Latin to make the point about privacy. All media drove traffic to KeepYourEmailPrivate. com, where visitors could learn more about Google's Gmail practices, use a translator to send private messages in Pig Latin that Google couldn't read, sign a petition, and try Outlook.com for better privacy. And to help people stop Google reading their messages on the go, a Pig Latin Translator smartphone app was created and made available in Google's own Android store.
Results
There were more than 1.5 million unique visitors to the website (150% of target) and the campaign started a movement with over 200,000 signing the online petition against Gmail's practices (1 in 300 people in the UK). With over 3 million earned media impressions and coverage in national news worth over £6 million, the campaign reached 40 million people in the UK. The mobile app was downloaded 1,000 times from the Google Play store, where users gave it a 4-star rating. Most importantly, over one million new Outlook.com accounts were opened in the UK during the campaign period. And, unprompted, consumers banded together to launch a class-action lawsuit against Google for breaching their privacy.
Our Thoughts
In the UK, one seldom sees this sort of ‘go-for-the-jugular’ sort of advertising.
In the USA, they are used to it. For instance, in the Presidential elections, each candidate spends more time rubbishing their rival than on setting out their own stall. This blunt approach was spoofed in the film ‘Crazy People’ when Dudley Moore wrote an ad to encourage tourists to go to Greece with the headline. ‘Don’t go to France. The French are rude. Come to Greece. We are nicer.’
So when a brick like this does get thrown through the window it is rather shocking. Clearly also rather effective.