Google Cloud was quietly disrupting the cloud services industry with innovations around data intelligence, AI, infrastructure and security. Its technology was helping businesses solve previously unsolvable challenges, but its value was misunderstood and underestimated in a category dominated by two early movers: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

By late 2022, the brand was trailing across key funnel and perception metrics—and being outspent in media by 10x. Google Cloud needed the brand to help drive the business forward. The brief was to develop a brand campaign to grow awareness and lift perception around innovation among enterprise decision-makers. The goal was to establish Google Cloud as the most innovative, future-focused leader in the category.

The creative idea centered on defining Google Cloud as “the new way to cloud”—a champion of challenging the status quo and the only cloud partner for those interested in creating better ways to do everything in business.

Building on this foundation, we developed a flexible creative system that divided the category in two, defined “the new way” and demonstrated its impact. The creative featured insightful rally cries to galvanize business leaders’ disruptive spirit, anthemic litanies celebrating how the technology was being applied, provocative claims to differentiate Google Cloud from legacy brands in the category and inspiring customer stories to demonstrate the impact of “the new way.”

The comms were focused on making business leaders question their cloud partner(s) by speaking to them on a human level, not a technical one. In the process, we created work that was accessible and inspiring to business leaders and their customers.

Using market research, internal data and interviews, we gained insight into business leaders' challenges, pain points with legacy cloud solutions and their desire for innovation. With all the environmental pressures surrounding them, business leaders were questioning how they do everything and eager for new solutions.

We saw this moment as an opportunity to claim leadership of a new era in business technology by dividing the category in two: All the cloud providers built for the way the world used to work and the one built for how the world works now. Google Cloud was already challenging the category, and it was time for the brand to reflect that same disruptive spirit to meaningfully engage with enterprise decision-makers (c-suite) and technology influencers (primarily within data-intensive industries).

We brought the campaign to life across a mix of channels to engage our audience in different contexts while leveraging each channel’s strengths.

We demanded attention with bold rally cries in high-impact OOH, earned credibility with provocative claims across commutes and endemic content online, and inspired with surprising use cases and customer stories in print and OLV.

This drumbeat of cross-channel storytelling was amplified at key moments. To make our brand as disruptive as our product, we took over Sphere in Las Vegas, hacking attention from the AWS conference. And we extended our message to a lean-back environment too, with a contextual, in-season campaign celebrating how Google Cloud is helping the MLB transform the league.

The global brand platform launched in the U.S. (June - September 2023) with a focus on four key markets (SF, NYC, CH, LA) before it was localized for Germany and India (September - November 2023).

The campaign exceeded goals and expectations for boosting key metrics across the funnel:

Display: +9.8pt lift in unaided awareness;+9 pt lift in consideration

OOH: +6pt lift in consideration; +8 pt lift in innovation perception

Drove 3x avg. campaign lift in unaided awareness and 4x avg. campaign lift in perception of Google Cloud as “innovative” in target markets

Mid-funnel halo with +25% increase in weekly sales inquiries

Overall, the campaign contributed to 22% YoY revenue growth in Q3 2023 (Alphabet, Q3 2023 Earnings Call) and a 7x increase in active generative AI projects Q2-Q3 (Alphabet, Q3 2023 Earnings Call).

The campaign challenged the category’s marketing playbook and made the brand a source of renewed hope for how technology can help the world move forward through our biggest challenges.