Strategic planning brought nuance, humanity and creative bravery to Google Cloud’s 2023 brand work. Instead of chasing feature parity with technical jargon, the platform reoriented the conversation to inspire business leaders seeking real transformation and showed that B2B does not have to be boring. Grounding in differentiated, customer-centric product truths — expressed through provocative questions and relatable moments — set Google Cloud in a category of one that helped the brand show up with empathy and confidence, and engage business leaders through a shared challenger spirit.

The cloud business is booming. Last year, companies spent $270 billion on cloud services. No wonder the industry is so hotly contested, with the tech world’s biggest names each spending millions on marketing, sales and advertising…a rivalry frequently referred to as the “Cloud Wars.”

Google Cloud was struggling to break through in a crowded category dominated by two early movers: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. It was a late-comer to the scene in 2008, and by 2022, the brand was still trailing across key funnel and perception metrics - as well as ad spend. The competition was outspending Google Cloud by 10x.

The brief was to develop a brand campaign to grow awareness and lift perception around innovation among C-Suite Executives and business decision makers. The goal was to establish Google Cloud as the most innovative, future-focused leader in the category.

In late 2022, businesses around the globe were still reeling from the effects of a global pandemic while facing a new wave of pressures: Supply chain disruption persisted, inflation soared and generative AI went mainstream. In Europe, new regulations around data use and standards for sustainable business models added to the list of challenges.

With old ways of working breaking down across industries—from air travel to healthcare—innovation was no longer a luxury but a necessity.

Google Cloud, a brand built on navigating the edge of technology and making it useful for companies, was in a position to help the business world create the new way forward in a way the category’s legacy leaders couldn’t. It was a critical opportunity to make business leaders reconsider Google Cloud as a partner while reinvigorating widespread hope in what technology can help us do.

No one thinks of Google as an underdog. But in the world of cloud, Google Cloud was a distant third in a two-horse race. Despite Google Cloud’s product leadership in AI, data intelligence, infrastructure, and security (not to mention the strength of the Google name), the cloud brand lacked recognition among decision-makers in a market dominated by Amazon and Microsoft. Its value was particularly underestimated by large companies whose leaders didn’t see Google Cloud as “enterprise ready” and had no answer to the question “Why Google Cloud?”.

Google Cloud needed the brand to help drive the business forward. We needed enterprise decision-makers and technology influencers to reconsider Google Cloud. And in order to do that, we had to reintroduce the brand in a way that differentiated it from the competition and dramatically shifted perception of Google Cloud from ‘late-comer to the cloud wars’ to ‘a catalyst for modern business.

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 created work that was accessible and inspiring to business leaders and their customers, creating the breakthrough moment we needed.

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.

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.

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.

In a time when cloud services brands were battling it out through features, accolades and cliche promises in the stale style B2B marketing has become famous for, we reintroduced Google Cloud in a campaign that applied all the best creative practices from B2C to the world of business services marketing.

Our work was more bold, benefit-forward, provocative and emotionally-engaging than anything our competitors had been doing at the time, and it was all an authentic reflection of the challenger position Google Cloud had in the market and the challenger spirit powering its product innovation.

We shifted the conversation from features to outcomes, emboldened leaders to act on their instinct to challenge the status quo, painted legacy players as outdated obstacles to progress and positioned Google Cloud in a category of one.