Branded entertainment is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for brands to connect with consumers. However, most often the brand, or product, takes a front seat in the creative story telling making it difficult to deliver a story that truly appeals to the audience. The Google Play and Interstellar partnership put the story and the consumer first to create a piece of content that was, above all, genuinely entertaining.

This film debuted in North America and was exclusively distributed through the Google Play store. It was not subject to any government restrictions or regulations.

The media strategy for Google Play during the Oscars was to get the real-time display ads in the hands of as many users as possible and to make this experience seamless across devices - capitalizing on user interest regardless of their second screen. We leveraged the massive reach of the Google Display Network (the #1 global display ad network) to serve hyper-contextual display ads instantly across desktop, the mobile web and within Android apps using a scalable HTML format. We complemented our real-time ads with a steady stream of Oscars content across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr.

Consumers who were exposed to the campaign searched for “Google Play Movies” at a 59% higher rate than the unexposed population. Click-through rates for the real-time ads were also 19% higher than for the non-realtime control ads, driving massive incremental traffic into the Play Store. We saw significant year-over-year growth in Movies sales on the store and were able to serve over 100 million real-time display impressions over the course of the Oscars broadcast, over 5 times our cumulative reach across social channels during the Oscars.