How we made it: Google AdWords 10th anniversary

Posted by Connor on: April 11, 2011 in: + rehabstudio, Build, Design, Editorial, Interactive

Q: How do you thank your customers for 10 years of support?

A: Well if you’re Google then you’re gonna want to send them all a unique personalised thank-you video with the name of the company projected on the moon, and spelt from 10Mil Dominos & robotic bees…

And here’s how we did it!
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Creative
We choose a hand-made cut and paste style for the channel – photographing all of the interface and graphical elements in the studio before manipulating them in Photoshop.

AdWords Sketches

For the first phase of the campaign we asked the Google AdWords community to participate by uploading their own personal AdWords success stories to the YouTube channel.

We worked with AKQA on the phase 2 which contained the personalised video. They created a challenging shot-list – so we immediately started to work on a bunch of prototypes to see how far we could push the tech. We’d done video personalisation before and this time we owned it!

Here’s one of the earlier tests that we put together, we had to produce the channel in 47 languages so we had to create a text parsing system to generate the company name dynamically over the top of the video.

During the course of the development we also worked on a few easter eggs, after all this was a birthday party & everyone loves a surprise on their birthday :)

Motion sensitive swarm of bees

Motion sensitive space invaders
Control the crosshair with your head, space bar to shoot!
The campaign launched, sent an email to each of their customers, the email contained a unique URL linking to the channel where users could view their personalised video.

Code visualisation
This is an awesome display of what it takes to actually bring a project to life, check out the video below which shows our developers contributing to the project during its development. The animated tree places the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves.

Final result

Final artwork

Click here to see the rehabstudio personalised video!

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