Google, Get Back To What You Love: The anatomy of a campaign
Asma Arshad, alumna of the Sookio Bootcamp, dissects Google’s ‘Get back to what you love’ campaign. What were the elements that gave it so much impact?
Despite the incredible success of the vaccination programme in the fightback against Covid-19, with hundreds of millions of people now having had their jabs, there has still been some resistance.
In March 2021 tech giant Google set out to persuade people otherwise through a poignant public health campaign with the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, called Get Back To What You Love.
What was the creative concept?
Drawing on the changing nature of search trends from the early days of the pandemic through the following months as we all began to cope with the disruption and face different challenge, the ad shows people searching for terms like quarantine, lockdown and social distancing…which are then deleted from the search bar in favour of virtual happy hour, then edited to remove virtual.
A simple white screen with the words “Get back to what you love” is then shown, followed by COVID vaccine near me. The goal is that the audience will mimic this call to action if they have not yet looked up their local vaccination centre.
What were the key messages?
At the start the ad implies that the world is going to change; things are starting to go back to normal.
You may think it's just a video that will give hope that the pandemic will soon be over; the surprise comes at the end when vaccine is mentioned. The key message in this ad is for us to get vaccinated, for things to get back to normal.
As they explain in their post on the YouTube blog, “Hugging your grandparents. Traveling with friends. Having family over for the holidays. Seeing co-workers in person. These are just some of the things people around the world are eager to get back to doing as we aim to return to a more normal way of life.”
What about the sound and visuals?
Compared to other public health campaigns around covid and its own campaigns to promote individual services and features, the Get Back to What You Love campaign was more minimal and stripped back, simply focusing on the power of words in a search bar alone.
The ad was not very cluttered; making it both visually appealing and easy to understand. Some YouTube commenters also found it ”satisfying” to watch some of the words being deleted.
The soundtrack is more subtle too. Some viewers may not realise when the background sound changes, for example, from a tune to voices and then to school bells.
What was the impact of the campaign?
Running across YouTube, US television and radio, and paid social posts through July 2021 the ad has now been viewed by 12m people. This will have had a positive impact upon the target audience of Americans aged 18 to 34, a key demographic to help control the spread of the virus.
This piece was written by one of the students on our second Sookio Bootcamp, a week of remote work experience for 20 young marketers. Read the other campaign analysis posts in the series: BBC Tokyo Olympics and Dove Reverse Selfie.