10 world-class agencies working on a simple brief: Help change the world

The COVID-19 pandemic is an extraordinary challenge. Decades of progress towards a better world is now at risk. We must re-ignite our efforts to keep the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Global Citizen is the largest advocacy organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty. Our movement at Global Citizen is people powered. We don't ask people to donate their money, we ask them for their action.

This year's partnership between Google and Global Citizen brings together 10 world-class creative and performance agencies from India, Brazil, the United States, and the UK. Each agency was assigned a recovery goal and they were tasked to use that goal to tell the story of Global Citizen in an authentic and local voice.

At Google, we know that creative is a major lever in terms of driving effectiveness. We have the right action-focused formats that can enable greater effectiveness, can enable greater results, and can drive true action. And that's exactly what we were striving to do with this initiative.

This year we tested video action campaigns and Google Discovery Ads to help drive measurable results and real action for Global Citizen. Discovery ads and action campaigns, they just go so well together because the way that I think about it is the action campaign is kind of the larger canvas, it has the more freedom to tell the story. But your discovery ads are the inception. Together they’re better.

To see these agencies take on this brief with such passion and such thoughtfulness. They’re harnessing creativity to be a force for good and a force for change and a force for growth.

There's these guidelines that we are made to follow now in this new normal but we realize that there's a lot of people that are unable to follow these guidelines. That’s really shed a light on racial inequality and injustice around the world and showed that not everybody has equal access to care.

We've hit a point in the climate crisis that we have no going back. But we can make it better and try to move forward and rebuild.

The idea behind the Make it Stop campaign was that we're all so used to seeing this but we're really letting people know, "You have the power to change this.

While we were creating, I tested positive for COVID. My lung was 40% compromised. At the hospital I saw the real heroes. I realized that people were fighting, not only against the COVID, but against the other pandemics -- people who don't believe the science, people who have no empathy for others.

Schools are symbolic spaces of learning, growth and refuge. Our creative strategy was to reinforce just how important these buildings are and how shocking it would be to see them disappear. "Stopping This Starts Here" was written to get people's attention in the first few seconds, before allowing them to click through from YouTube to the Global Citizen’s website to sign up and stop the destruction happening.

So Dave, why do you think it was important that we brought performance agencies to partner alongside our creative agencies globally?

The success of this project is because the briefs were worked on together. They partnered throughout this process, and I think we're seeing the results really come true because of that partnership.

Tell me about some of the results and takeaways.

The key result: a massive campaign for Global Citizen. Tens of thousands registered to become global citizens. A 220% increase, which is amazing. And that is the end result we want for more people to become a force for good. What we've seen from this partnership is that when you have these two ad formats together, video action campaigns and discovery ads, it's an optimal way to drive creative and effective campaigns.

Yeah. I mean, the results show how they were better together and that it doesn't have to be daunting to try to think about two different formats, because all of our agencies seem to pull together what they could from the video work to then use it in the discovery format.

Just looking at the data, looking at the campaigns together, it’s fantastic.

Stories, if done right, really should make us want to do something. I think we kind of have to have a renaissance of action. And I think this project is starting to kickstart that with the agency world.

I think this is the best time ever to use creativity and effectiveness to inspire people to take action for other people.

All the things and all the actions that you take in digital spaces ultimately do make a difference in the real world.

These campaigns and this partnership really helps us in realizing the possibilities and in reimagining really how, and in what way, we can drive real, measurable change.

This was the most successful digital acquisition campaign for Global Citizen in the past year, and we're very proud of that. We learned that bringing creative and media closer together makes a difference. We learned that data driven creativity and a focus on the objective of action makes a difference. When we start to break down those silos, when we start to think about the objectives, the possibilities are really endless and we're excited about what's next.