Our 'Google on the Street' team have been busy talking to people about their travel priorities since the recession. How have priorities changed? What are people looking for, when and how. We wanted to get some insights into the following questions.
How are consumers choosing their holiday destinations, what motivates them?
What does value mean?
How is online helping those who are looking for value?
How has corporate travel been affected since the recession?
Do some consumers still prefer face to face interaction rather than booking online?
Take a look at this video to see what people said…
This guest post in our ‘Planner’s Favourite' series, is written by Matthew Hook, Head of Strategy at Vizeum. We've asked Matthew to chose a favourite between three campaigns from E.ON, The Royal Marines, and Carl's Jr. Burgers. Many thanks to Matt for a great post. - Ed.
Three very different pieces of work, three very different answers to the question “What is YouTube?”
EON have decided that YouTube is a place to demonstrate their willingness to engage in an open dialogue with their consumers about the future of energy. They have embraced openness, and haven’t sought to pre-edit what in some cases are some slightly silly contributions. This approach requires a great level of commitment from the company. Some of the users clearly felt that the company’s response could have been a little bit quicker and a bit less corporate, and also that there wasn’t a clear sense of what the company would do with the feedback. So top marks for ambition, but some room for improvement on delivery so that this feels like a real company commitment.
For the Royal Marines YouTube is a chance to give exposure to a range of content that can’t be delivered effectively through broadcast media. The content and delivery of the site is of really high quality and very interesting. The numbers aren’t huge, but the strategy clearly relies on quality rather than quantity, and people’s response has been highly enthusiastic. The only danger here is that you end up with a solution that feels just a little reliant on ‘broadcast’ thinking. It uses YouTube as a channel, rather than a platform and community. As an opening gambit this is great – but it would be intriguing to see what the Royal Marines will do with these people now that they have got them interested, and how it can use them to help others to get involved.
Then a very different approach form Carl’s Burgers. They seem to me to have the most insightful understanding of what YouTube is – a content sharing platform that has been built into a creative community by the efforts and expertise of its ‘super-users’. Carl’s aren’t trying to change the world, and really they are just getting people to play with their advertising. But the big difference is that by enthusing super-users they have achieved much bigger numbers – including 1,000,000 video views in 24 hours particularly. So Carl’s Burgers is my overall planner’s choice – simply for recognising that YouTube is a community that has some really powerful leaders, and engaging those leaders with their campaign to deliver enthusiastic engagement on a massive scale.
Guest Post by Matthew Hook, Head of Strategy at Vizuem
This is the fourth round of our 'Planner's Favourite' series where we ask a respected planner from the media industry to judge a selection of campaigns that are running on our platforms. -Ed.
E.ON wanted to provide a forum where people can debate the major energy issues of our time. We all want cheap, reliable and renewable energy, but sadly probably can't have all 3 - the Trilemma. They wanted an online customer service channel where they could engage with some of their fiercest critics. It is the 6th most viewed sponsored channel this month with over 76K channel views. This is a first for an energy company and a brave attempt to tackle a difficult topic they traditionally have avoided discussing in public. This campaign was supported by press activity.
Looking to grab the attention of its target customers (young men), Carl's Jr. sought out a new kind of network buy with YouTube, with which it challenged 9 of the site's most popular "stars" to create videos showing how they would eat Carl's new Portobello Mushroom Burger. The nine YT stars uploaded into their own accounts - capitalizing on their subscriber base. Each video contains an annotation which drives to the Carl's Jr. brand channel. The idea was to create a community around Carl's Jr. to leverage the target's online behavior. The channel had nearly 1M video views in 24 hours, thousands of comments and tweets, and Carl's is the #1 most-viewed sponsor channel of the day. The campaign also won the OMMA 2009 Best in Show Award.
This follows a high-profile online and TV campaign from the British Army geared toward targeting young men interested in signing up to the armed forces through interactive gaming-style missions. The Marines YouTube channel is targeted at 16-24 yr old males and features four sections - RMC Training, Extreme VS Marines, State of Mind, and Ambush and Assault. Each section has rich video content, bringing to life the Royal Marines' state of mind - the ethos which sets the Royal Navy's apart from any other armed forces. Videos will be reviewed monthly, with fresh new content and training videos added on a regular basis. The channel has had over 50K views, is the 6th most subscribed sponsored channel.
Goollery is a collection of great Google related projects from people around the world. Here I want to share with you just some creative uses of Google Maps.
Real Time Twitter Trendmaps: Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. Users can visualize and follow conversations on a local and global level. Users can click on a trend and follow the conversation in real-time. Stweet: Mashup geo-coded mobile tweets with StreetView or Maps so that you can see where other people are twittering from. Uniqlo Fashion Map: Interactive website acts as a fashion map of Tokyo. The site allows users to visit the various districts of the city and “meet” it’s inhabitants- even being able to buy what they are wearing. The Parka Campaign features 1,000 men and women, all adding their own unique touches to the ubiquitous parka - culminating in a video montage of the jacket being passed from one part of the city to the other. By Uniqlo and Graffiti Magazine’s ‘Tokyo Graffiti’ publication, Tokyo. Make History: September 11th: Make History captures September 11th through Google streetview to show photos and how those areas look today. Built with Google app engine. By the National September 11th Memorial & Museum in partnership with design firm Local Projects. Users can Create a virtual memorial to 9/11 using Street View imagery and layers of digital storytelling. MONOPOLY City Streets – A live global game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. Own any street across the world and play to become the richest property magnate ever. The inspiration from MONOPOLY City Streets was taken from their latest game board, MONOPOLY City. MONOPOLY wanted to bring the updated game play to life in a unique way and a new game was born.
There are lots of creative uses of Google product on Goollery. Take a look and see if it sparks some creative ideas for your campaigns.
Using Google search data, Google have created a Barometer to show how consumer confidence is faring in our ever-changing climate. The search trend line is made up of keywords that reflect changing consumer sentiment; these are then plotted on a chart hosted on our Survival of the Fastest channel (click Trends tab). Our barometer indicates that consumer confidence is showing signs of recovery. This trend is also reflected in analysis done by the OECD and in Morgan Stanley’s Economy & Internet trends Report Oct 09 (slide 17).
If we look at our real time insights tool ‘Google Insights for Search’ we can also spot some green shoots. Searches for repossessions are down 50% year on year in Oct 09. In Oct 08 searches for ‘Safe Savings’ rose 2500% year on year. It has since fallen back to pre-credit crunch levels. Searches for ‘end of the recession’ are new to 2009 as consumers look towards better climate. More people are searching for last minute deals than this time last year. Searches for real estate agencies are up in 09 vs 08. And, are people starting to think about purchasing cars again?
To find out what consumers think our 'Google on the Street' Team went out and asked them. Do people think we are at the end of the recession? What kind of purchases are we considering? How is online shopping helping consumers survive in an uncertain climate? Watch the video below to see what people are saying.
Over the summer we have continued to grow the Survival of the fastest business channel and the hub now has 415 videos from over 100 senior business executives and 7 Google events.
Just recently we uploaded all the videos and presentations for both tech@google'09 and the Google Retail Summit 2009. This content can be found on the "Events" tab. There is some great video content there, take a look in particular at Charlie is so cool like, who was a big hit at the tech@google summit and gave some great insight into youth media consumption trends.
Here is a (very!) quick look back at Google's story of the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome. You can also find this on YouTube. Enjoy!
