We managed to localise one of the most divisive and least engaging campaigns from Microsoft - "Scroogle" in the UK market in a way that was engaging and created action amongst consumers.
To reduce favourability of Gmail and drive trial of Outlook.com, we paired an interesting fact about 98% of Gmail users with an interesting fact about Gmail and discovered a language Google can’t read – Pig Latin.
We created a Gmail account to test Google’s contextual advertising practice. A simple email asking whether a BMW is better than an Audi was served ads about car insurance and auto dealers. However, the same email written in Pig Latin – the childish language in which you move the first letters of a word to the end of the word and add ‘ay’ – was served random ads for cat food and envelopes. We discovered that Google couldn't understand Pig Latin.
So we created an entire campaign that Google couldn’t read. In Pig Latin.
The campaign included print, digital, radio, and a TV commercial with the entire dialogue in Pig Latin, all driving traffic to the website KeepYourEmailPrivate.com where visitors could learn more about Google’s practices, use our translator to send private messages in Pig Latin that Google couldn't read, sign a petition, and try Outlook.com for better privacy. And to help people stop Google reading their messages on the go, we created a Pig Latin Translator smartphone app, available in Google’s own Android store.