The Campaign

In recent years corporate brands have identified the annual Sydney Mardi Gras event as an opportunity to communicate to a large audience, in a non-traditional way, through extending sponsorship of the event into the creation of branded floats to take part in the parade. This year, for the first time in many years, the event was not broadcast on national television but recorded and made available after the event, via a webcast for global viewing. With the event gaining interest outside of Australia, we saw an opportunity to utilise the Google+ product to connect people from around the globe, to the event on the night through a live streaming video hangout.

Results

Supporting employee diversity has driven Google’s partnership with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and their participation in one of Sydney’s most loved festivals, over the past 2 years. Our challenge was to create a Google branded float for the parade, showcasing the Google+ product while still supporting the overall message of the Mardi Gras event; infinite love and marriage equality. Google’s objective was to raise awareness of Google+, their social media platform, and position themselves in the Australian market by showcasing key selling points of content sharing and live video calling. Strategically we decided to connect people from around the world to the event and generate awareness of Google+ by showcasing the product functionality as a central part of our idea, through hosting a live streaming Google+ hangout from the float and incorporating user-generated content into our communications on the night. Webcams and mobile phones powered by the newly launched 4G network, were positioned on the float and in the crowd, and Google+ followers from around the globe enjoyed a unique viewpoint to the celebration via a video stream never seen before. We invited the Google+ community to share photos and video content prior to the event communicating their message of infinite love and showcased this on the float for spectators to enjoy. Creatively as Google+ offers consumers the ability to control sharing of content to circles of friends, we designed a parade float containing large LED circular billboards, representing the event theme of infinity and the Google+ circular motif. Billboards in this shape, on this scale powered by generators had never been done before in Australia.

The Sydney Mardi Gras parade was attended by hundreds of thousands of spectators who lined the streets to see over 9,000 people marching with a procession of glittering floats, communicating a united message of infinite love and marriage equality. The audience was drawn to and engaged with the content, 4 weeks prior to the event when we invited the Google+ community to share photos and video content communicating their message of love, to be showcased at the event. The user-generated content was edited and displayed on bold circular LED screens; this shape was visible by all spectators on both sides of the parade track at the event. The live Google+ hangout feeds, available to Google+ users worldwide, were positioned at the DJ booth, behind the float onto the Google staff dancing and inside the crowd to provide the best and most impactful angles for viewing.

The Sydney Mardi Gras parade was attended by hundreds of thousands of spectators who witnessed the Google+ float as part of the event procession. Over 100 Google staff danced in unison with the Google+ float supporting employee diversity. We drove more than 10,000 new followers to the Sydney Mardi Gras Google+ page and had over 85,000 views of our video a week after it was posted on You Tube. The Google+ hangout hosted on the Google Australia site streamed live to over 65 participants from around the globe for the hour long event, the first of its kind done in the 34 years of the Sydney Mardi Gras event. And the Google float was the most talked about at the event.