Background

As the company’s first and long standing product, Google Search helps users find information quickly whenever and wherever they need it. As part of ongoing improvements, Soccer Search on Google is intuitive and user friendly, offering extensive information about a team's scores, background and upcoming games in the "OneBox" search result format. Fans can keep track of what’s happening on and off the pitch providing a digital experience for exploring group tables, stats, trending players, video recaps from select broadcasters featuring goals and highlights of major match moments. In 2018, it was imperative that we established Google’s Soccer Search as the easiest way to get real-time football information in APAC. Google wanted to drive awareness on the magic of Soccer OneBox search by educating on query and features and showcasing the OneBox as the one-stop place where they can get all soccer information, anytime, anywhere.

Describe the creative idea

Without a quick and easy way to get soccer information in one stop, it's difficult for soccer fans to keep up and be part of the conversation. Our research helped us make fine tune our campaign based on local nuances and differences: 1. Global vs local leagues: we knew that European leagues were big in Thailand and Indonesia. For instance, Thai fans constituted #2 and #4 in total fans of the global Facebook fan pages of Manchester United and Liverpool FC respectively. 2. “The World Cup” in Vietnam: International Football as opposed to club football was massively popular in Vietnam. With a recent victory of the underdog nation Vietnamese U23 team in the AFC, football had become a part of national identity. 3. Local nuances: our Indonesian creative messaging and visuals depicted settings from a local phenomenon called no-bar, which is a collective viewing in a neighbourhood.

Describe the strategy

Across Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam football fans belong to and follow different leagues and matches and were of varying degrees of fandom but had clear information needs. They also have different and highly local behaviours that help them connect with each other over soccer. In Vietnam where football is a religion, everyone is a hardcore fan and speaks fluent football therefore our campaign was targeted to fans young and old, to help encourage their passion of the sport. In Indonesia, football is an ice-breaker. There are light fans and hardcore fans and our campaign had to be about helping everyone speak fluent football. In Thailand, fans are time-starved and want to keep up with the sport while going about their daily life and our campaign there had to be about ease.

Describe the execution

For Southeast Asians, football is KING. The sport is the most popular in the region with fans identifying both with local as well as global championships like the World Cup and Premier League clubs. In a digitally connected world, soccer fans as well are increasingly using smartphones to keep up with match sores, news and streaming. Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia search trends and Facebook audience insights showed that the clear dominant sport that cut across all markets was football. An analysis of Daily Active Users showed that sports was a key passion area that was well represented in the mix of queries that our power users searched for in the market. Therefore, football became our entry point to change perceptions. We gave fans a first hand experience of the Soccer Search product through the ads using a mix of Instagram stories, Vogons, display ads and Live Game AR filters. Soccer fans were also exposed to different content and formats every time they saw an ad - realtime and reactive match schedules, match scores, match highlights and in match activity. The result was over 11,000 different ad iterations and formats across Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia that included: - Dynamic creative with search results of the respective schedules, scores and highlights etc. - Customised ads dynamically targeted and matched to the match game airing times with highlight queries, scores and scheduling built in. - Reactive Ads across Google Display Network and YouTube bumpers and Directors Mix pre roll ads that reacted to red cards, goals, fouls and other in-game moments. - “Game Time AR Filters based ads” on Facebook.

List the results

The campaign performed very well, winning us daily active users and changing perceptions of Google search to become a place for daily passion points- and the biggest one - football. With a reach of over 130M and 1.8M+ total daily active users acquired across Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, the campaign saw strong brand lifts amongst soccer fans constantly, throughout and after each phase. We achieved a major behaviour shift of acquiring new habitual Daily Active Users (+108% in Vietnam,+22% in Indonesia and +80% in Thailand) using football as a passion point. 68% total habitual users were sustained post campaign, ensuring millions were able to maximise their football fan experience. As a result we were able to associate Google search to a passion point like sport across 3 key markets of notable headroom. This changed Google Search’s perception of being a "academic" resource and gave us habitual Daily active users.