4 days. 180k attendees. 14k competitors.

CES is one of the busiest, loudest and most overwhelming events on earth. Our task was to make the Google Assistant one of the most talked-about products at the show, even though the product itself isn’t new -- it’s the digital assistant in almost a billion Google and Android devices.

Our brief: communicate that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, the Google Assistant is the most helpful digital assistant to help you overcome life’s daily challenges. The challenge was to make this story of everyday helpfulness compelling enough for CES attendees to choose Google’s booth over the myriad of other possibilities -- ping pong-playing robots, foldable phone screens, and human-carrying drones.

We knew that if we could get the tech world talking, we could open everyone’s eyes to the power of the Google Assistant in navigating life’s twists and turns.

The Google Assistant Ride – a 65 ton, 14ft animatronic character filled, theme park-grade ride built from the ground up in a CES booth – demonstrating how the Assistant can help you navigate through the twists and turns of life.

Contrasting the mundane with the magical, the ride told the story of how the Assistant helped a hapless Dad overcome language barriers, grumpy children, and bad weather on an epic journey to buy a birthday cake. The 15-minute experience started with an animated pre-show, and finished with obligatory ride photos and an entire floor of product demonstrations to reinforce the narrative.

CES is a tech-saturated summit of insanity. It’s the keynote of keynotes. This is where technology from VCRs to HDTV, Tablets to XBox have debuted. Attendees are looking for cutting-edge technology that’s about to change the world. It’s also a space to size up the competition, making it incredibly hard for ideas to get noticed.

Did we mention that we didn’t have an insane new product to talk about? We had the Google Assistant, which can perform more than a million helpful actions to better your everyday life, but the Assistant had already been installed in almost a billion devices.

We realized that we needed to build an experience so absurd it would create news - and with it, richer product understanding for all the Assistant can do.

The Google Assistant Ride boasted 30,000 square ft. of interactions showcasing the helpfulness of the Assistant. After being greeted by a live, actor-controlled animatronic Grandma, there was a 3 minute scene-setting pre-show, followed by a 5 minute ride with 14-foot tall foam characters interacting with equally oversized Google hardware. An original song helped carry the story of our main character as he moved through his day. Each cart on the ride was equipped with a screen that played out the Assistant interactions, so riders could follow along.

The story continued in the rest of the space, where every feature mentioned on the ride could be experienced first hand with a live demo: a real French chef who you could speak to using the Assistant’s interpreter mode, actual Ford cars to discover the Assistant as navigator with Google Maps, and live cooking demos with the Assistant as sous chef.

Across 4 days, CES badge holders were able to ride The Google Assistant Ride for free, with over 25,000 attendees visiting the experience. The Google Assistant Ride was also available via a 360 tour on Youtube to everyone at home, garnering 700,000+ views to date.

The Ride generated over 37 million social impressions, 500+ broadcast hits and 1200+ articles. It even created a minor storm among the theme park enthusiast community who began lobbying to have it installed at a theme park permanently. CNBC said it was “the most impressive booth experience” they’d ever seen, The Verge described it as “the craziest thing at CES” and it demonstrated Google’s commitment to the Assistant for key partners.