Google is going all Marty McFly on Madison Avenue, sponsoring a back-to-the-future project that reimagines classic campaigns from the “Mad Men” age for modern sensibilities — and technologies.
The project, announced on Friday, involves an internal team at Google; an advertising agency that works for Google, Johannes Leonardo, part of WPP; and creators of the original campaigns from the 1960s and 1970s.
Four campaigns are being remixed for the 21st century with large infusions of Google products and services like Google Maps, Google Mobile, Google Translate, Gmail and YouTube. They are the 1972 commercial for Alka-Seltzer about a gourmand named Ralph who moans, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”; the “We try harder” campaign for Avis car rental, which began in 1962; the 1971 “Hilltop” commercial for Coca-Cola, in which a chorus sang of its desire to “buy the world a Coke and keep it company”; and a Volvo campaign from 1963 that carried the theme “Drive it like you hate it.”
For instance, the new campaign inspired by “Hilltop” gives consumers a chance to “send a free Coca-Cola across the world,” the ads say, to “someone you’ve never met” through mobile apps and customised vending machines. And the new campaign for Volvo offers an opportunity to virtually follow Irv Gordon, the owner of a 1966 Volvo P1800s coupe, as he closes in on three million miles on his odometer.
The initiative is called Project Re:Brief, as in rethinking a vintage creative brief for the digital era. The goal of the gaggle of Googlers involved is to help demonstrate to marketers and agencies that campaigns in new media need not appeal only to the rational side of consumers and can be as emotional as those from the so-called golden age of advertising.
“We started to think about how Web ads can move from being informative and transactional to delighting and engaging, stirring the soul and building a brand,” said Jim Lecinski, vice president for United States sales and service at Google.
Project Re: Brief is “an experiment, like how automobile companies build a concept car or clothing companies put on a runway fashion show,” he added. “It’s about what it inspires everyone else to do.”
The four campaigns chosen for reworking were all for “iconic brands, brands the industry and creatives look to for inspiration,” Mr. Lecinski said, and “they’re all based on emotive ideas.”
The creators of the original campaigns participated in the project.
The new ads will give consumers a look at “a day in the life of Ralph” eating the whole thing from breakfast through dinner.
Jackie Jantos, global creative director at the Coca-Cola Company, said that she would “love to do it again.”
“It’s less about taking content from our past and recontextualising it and more about finding new and interesting ways to use technology to have more conversations with our fans,” she added.
Ms. Jantos praised the updated “Hilltop” as “amazing” because it provided a real-world version of the story of the original commercial “about bringing people together.”
“There was a woman in South Africa and a man in Buenos Aires who were able to have a little conversation back and forth,” she added, on a video screen embedded in one of the special vending machines.
Because Project Re: Brief is a Google marketing effort, the money to develop and produce the campaigns came from the Google marketing budget and the four marketers did not spend any ad dollars. The cost of the project is estimated to be in the low seven figures.
© The New York Times News Service
