The Creative Solutions team at Time Out London took Gold at last night's Media Week Awards at Grosvenor House, for our ‘Time Out talks to Google’ cross-platform campaign.
For the first time in its 46 year history, Time Out London restructured its entire magazine production process to delivery a hugely ambitious idea for Google to drive awareness and trial of the Google Search App and its ‘Talk to Google’ proposition.
Google Search App is a voice activated search engine, enable users to ask for information through a microphone, which Google can verbally answer instantly for a personal, mobile and timely search experience. As the trusted global platform that inspires and enables people to experience the best of the city, Time Out users often have tacit questions that need answering for them to act on its content. So the team devised a way for Google Search App to speak to Time Out content, to ask those questions instantly.
The main challenge for the Creative Solutions team was how to create a dynamic interaction in the static medium of a print magazine, at scale.
Across every section of the magazine, for 2 months, Google advertising provided answers to questions asked by content on each page, delivered as they appear in the Google Search App. To meet challenging exceptionally tight print deadlines for producing the contextual advertising creative, Time Out took the unprecedented step of restructuring its production process to allow the creative agency to collaborate with section editors on the content. This exceptional editorial decision was justified by the fact that the execution became genuinely valuable content in itself to the reader.
The print campaign was an undoubted success for Google and Time Out. Following the success of the London print campaign, Google extended the campaign onto timeout.com as well as a second phase in focused around food. Launching platforms in Manchester and Edinburgh platforms (their two key cities outside London), Google funded the production two standalone Time Out magazine in cities where Time Out doesn’t have a print specifically for the campaign.
Overall results included:
- 64 bespoke advertising executions with over 168 different questions and answers from Google relating exactly to that content on the page
- 9% increase in downloads of Google Search App in London
- +5%pts increase in more than once a week usage
- +5%pts in awareness of the notion that ‘I can talk to Google’
- +9%pts awareness that “Google can talk back”
- Pre/post-launch average usage net gain was +16% in London, +59% in Edinburgh, & +51% in Manchester
Ryan Saunders, Google Media Lab (EMEA) said “Time Out integrated Google into the very heart of their print and digital products in order to achieve the contextual relevance required to communicate the key USP’s of the Google Search App. The scale of what they achieved within a print product is quite outstanding and the results are a credit to the innovate approach”.