2014 Gold IT and telecommunications

Wunderman

'The Campaign Google couldn't eadRay'

Client Microsoft UK

How did the campaign make a difference? The Campaign Google couldn’t eadRay

Outlook.com had been losing market share to Gmail for over a decade and needed to reverse the trend.

They had to find a legal way to detract from their competitor’s product and win back customers on ethical grounds.

By using the playground language of Pig Latin across a wide range of media to destroy the credibility of Gmail’s privacy practices, Outlook was successfully and straightforwardly presented as the good guy who offered a solution to a problem that many didn’t know they had.

Strategy What consumers do not know is that Google scans email and targets ads relevant to the private content of those conversations. Outlook.com does not.

The challenge was to highlight this competitive advantage in the highly complex and regulated world of competitive advertising.

An integrated campaign was developed using Pig Latin – the playground language that moves the first letter of a word to the end of the word and adds ‘ay’, making email text unreadable to Google.

The campaign used print, digital, radio and TV to drive traffic to KeepYourEmailPrivate.com, where people could learn more about Google’s practices, use a translator to send Pig Latin Gmails, sign a petition against Google’s invasion of privacy and try Outlook.com.

And to stop Google reading people’s mobile emails, the ‘Pig Latin Translator’ app was developed for Windows Phone and cheekily made available at the Google Play store.

Creativity The creative use of Pig Latin had real ‘look at me’ quality – its bold typographical use in the press stopped the page turning.

On TV, two characters apparently talking even more gibberish than usual in the pub had the same ‘what’s going on?’ effect on viewers. And when it became clear that talking gibberish is the only way to stop Google reading your emails, the impact was huge. What was comic became very serious, emphatically driving the point home.

The other creative extensions of the idea were also effective – such as the Pig Latin Translator app and the lovely touch of placing it in the Google Play store.

This was a campaign of great ideas superbly realised within testing legal constraints. All media had the same consistent clear messaging and TOV.

Results ‘The Campaign Google couldn’t eadRay’ created a public revelation – successfully raising public support and growing intolerance relating to a targeting and privacy issue few people actually knew about.

1 in 300 people in the UK were persuaded to sign a petition against Google’s privacy policies and 1.5 million visits were made to the campaign microsite.

Team James Latham - Business Director, Paul Davies - Head of Marketing, Chloe Lockett - Senior Account Manager, Suzanne Moules - Senior Project Manager, Tom Redican - Senior Creative Art Buyer, Jonathan Hulse - Marketing Lead, Kevin Guild - CArt Worker, Hayley Ziepe - Senior Project Manager, Matt Batten - Chief Creative Officer, Stephen Guy - Managing Partner, Ram Aiyar - Digital Project Manager, Capucine Coutou - Project Manager, Amy Chalkley - Project Director, OddBjorn Stensrud - Creative Team, Koush Forshami - Creative Team, Joe Morgan - Strategist, Kevin Mercer - Strategist, Ben Richardson - Senior Designer, Ian Saunders - Senior Designer, Richard Dunn - Chief Strategy Officer