Today, people take thousands of photos on their smartphones. But phones run out of space, particularly ones with smaller storage like a 16GB iphone. We wanted to remind people of the pain they feel when running out of storage right when they are trying to take a photo and give them a new solution for it. So, we re-created amazing moments where people are just about to snap the perfect photo..and then stop them - using the same alert everyone on earth has come to loathe - the “Cannot Take Photo” alert.

The campaign came to life over 2 months during the summer of 2016. It launched with a bang on national TV during the Olympics and was followed up with high impact digital and social placements over the following months. We served over 1.5bn impressions across different media platforms and reached 70m users with our creative.

Campaign strongly outperformed the brief and went above expectations in terms of both brand and user value. Key top-line metrics:

13.5m downloads of the Google Photos app during first month of campaign alone

5 Petabytes of space freed up on smartphones for users (250 million photos)

120m people reached by media

6% pt increase in brand awareness for Google Photos

Positive social sentiment and good media coverage