Google Year in Search 2014

  • James Heath
  • Lachlan Williams
At the end of 2014 R/GA London had been tasked with creating the site for the search engine that told the story of the worlds 2014. Robin Williams, the comic actor who took his own life, was the most popular Google search in 2014, The most popular searches across the world after Williams were: the World Cup; Ebola; Malaysian Airlines; ALS Ice Bucket challenge; Flappy Bird; Conchita Wurst; Isis; Frozen; Sochi Olympics. R/GA had built a hub to tell these stories in rich detail, however they needed a wrap up video that pulled together all of this content. I was brought on fairly late in the project to oversee production as we only had six weeks to create the necessary video content, with the New Year deadline looming. The challenge was getting the content approved in time from all around the world, from variety of sources across major studios, television and YouTube, as well as creating a variety of extended and cut down versions for local markets around the world. A large team was assembled within R/GA, I worked closely through the approvals process with Google as we partnered with a number of post-production agencies to pull off a job of this scale and timing. The campaign was hailed as success with 33 million views and counting, the first time Google’s end of year wrap up had been launched as TV commercial in the US and many awards won.