Contact
Microsoft Outlook - Pig Latin The campaign Google couldn’t eadRay.
AGENCY: WUNDERMAN LONDON
Story time, TLDR below. This campaign came out during the public discourse around online privacy that ultimately led to GDPR. Hotmail had just been rebranded to become Outlook.com, and our task was to take a stance against the market leader Gmail. Back then, and possibly still depending on when you are reading this, Google would scan every email you wrote for keywords, and then serve you back ‘relevant’ ads.
Microsoft was not, at time, doing this.
Just for fun I turned off my trusty adblocker (I admit it) to see how I could manipulate the keyword AI. Turns out it was pretty simple - Google was great at serving ads for anything I wrote about.
My next thought was how do I bring a multi billion dollar empire to its knees? I reached back through time to my kindergarden years when pig latin (Or røverspråket as I knew it then) had kept managment out of my covert operations. The certainly had heard rumours about someone expertly lighting small controlled fires with a magnifying glass, but I’m getting sidetracked here. In short this:
TLDR
Gmail’s billion dollar ad algorithm could not understand children’s play language Pig Latin. So we created a plugin that would translate all your email to Pig Latin. If you thought that was a hassle, then there’s always Microsoft Outlook.
TVC
We shot a TV ad entirely in Pig Latin that aired prime-time across Great Britain. Presumably a world first, but I haven’t googled that.
Shot on location at a pub in London, UK.