Title	GOOGLE OUTSIDE: A STORYTELLING PLATFORM
Brand	GOOGLE UK
Product/Service	LOCATION BASED DIGITAL BILLBOARDS
Category	A01. Innovation
Entrant Company	R/GA London, UNITED KINGDOM
Advertising Agency	R/GA London, UNITED KINGDOM
Advertising Agency 2	TALON London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Agency	MANNING GOTTLIEB OMD London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production Company	GRAND VISUAL London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Anthony Baker	R/GA London	Technical Lead
Clara Tudela	R/GA London	Visual Designer
Dan John/Taraneh Khosrowshahi	R/GA London	Senior Producer
Francis Horsman	R/GA London	Technology Team Leader And Solutions Architect
Gabriel Dobritescu/Razvan Creanga	R/GA London	Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
James Temple/George Prest	R/GA London	Executive Creative Director
Luke Wicker/Wilf Eddings	R/GA London	Creative
Mircea Georgescu/Gabriel Totoliciu	R/GA London	Open Standards Developer
Patrick Van Kann/Dave Robbins	R/GA London	Executive Technical Lead/Executive Delivery Director
Pete Jupp	R/GA London	Design Director
Remi Abayomi	R/GA London	Group Account Director
Ricardo Amorim	R/GA London	Creative Director
Stuart Tayler	R/GA London	Experience Design Director
Viorel Sfetea	R/GA London	Senior Software Engineer
Alessandro Stefani	Google EMEA	Product Marketing Manager
Graham Bednash	Google EMEA	Consumer Marketing Director
Martin De Fleurian	Google UK	Product Marketing Manager
James Thomas	Manning Gottlieb OMD	Manning Gottlieb Omd
Jonathan Conway/Jamie Finn/David Williams	Talon Outdoor	Talon Outdoor
Dan Dawson/Jeremy Taylor/Ben Putland	Grand Visual	Grand Visual

The Brief

We don’t think, we just search. Taking the habits we’ve learnt on desktop, straight to the devices in our hands. But search on mobile is different - it’s all about context. Google Search App (GSA) uses your location, day, time and search behaviours, to predict and deliver the right information, at the right time. Our big technical challenge was to replicate this search experience on over 200 screens across London. There was simply no system in place to deliver this kind of localized and targeted messaging. So we developed a new storytelling platform, tailored to time and place, enabling us to deliver relevant search stories that our London audience could relate to. We needed a cloud architecture to tailor stories without knowing the data in advance. So we created a distributed system that could coordinate the consumption and mash up of APIs, and generate thousands of unique stories. Furthermore, we designed bespoke tools to browse, explore and troubleshoot the data being pushed to screens. Our team researched the most recent Google cloud services, including Google AppEngine and ComputeEngine. Using asynchronous techniques we managed huge amounts of data in under 30 minutes, to produce thousands of unique stories every day.

Innovation is often about coming up with smart ways of using existing technology and infrastructure. Rather than build our own devices from scratch, we leveraged traditional out of home screens, turning non-interactive advertising spaces into something useful and human. By using Python, Google AppEngine, Google CloudEngine, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, Google TaskQueues, we created a cutting edge system, able to transform isolated information coming from Google APIs into a contextually aware story telling platform. We added our own bespoke web interfaces to allow creatives, designers, copyrighters and producers to use the system in an effective, user friendly way. Our search stories were written to speak directly to Londoners in all of their diversity, using a tone of voice that felt natural, every day and occasionally, like a glint in the eye: ‘remind me to take Grandad out for a drink’, ‘what is Fergie time’, ‘how do I say more cheese please in Italian’, ‘what does bread and honey mean’. Our system ran daily, rolling out stories tailored to location, date, time and weather conditions: generating over 3000 unique stories a day, pooled from 5000 content cards, serving London’s four biggest media networks and sending contextual data to over 200 screens. The end result, is a new kind of story telling platform that can tailor an experience on the fly, powering hundreds of traditional screens around the city, and transforming them into a new source of information.

We created a dynamic, scalable, robust and secure digital marketing platform. Allowing Google to roll out tailored storytelling campaigns across countries, languages, locations and devices for years to come. The first phase of Google Outside generated a significant improvement in brand sentiment: Transport for London hailed the project as 'the most innovative campaign ever run on our placements,’ 92% of people who saw it found the content interesting, 89% found it informative, 78% said they learned something new, and 68% found it personally relevant. Most importantly, 1 in 5 people who saw Google Outside downloaded the Google Search app.