The big idea was “lf Shaz can do it, ‘youse’ can too”.
Sharon Strzelecki returned to screens around the country when Google teamed up with Emotive to transform B2B marketing with an entertaining how-to ad.
Strzelecki, played by comedian and actress Magda Szubanski, fronts the campaign which shows her using a range of ad tools to find customers for her Bowled & Beautiful hairdressing business.
The brief from Google tasked the independent creative agency Emotive to create a campaign to launch Google’s suite of AI-powered tools after a survey found that 61% of small businesses are finding it challenging to attract new customers.
Emotive CEO Simon Joyce said the well-known Australian character Strzelecki was selected to front the campaign to “dramatise the ease” of using Google Ads.
“Despite Google ads being such a staple for so many marketers and businesses, people thought they needed to be more experienced to use it... that's what informed our strategy,” he told AdNews.
“SMBs with teams of 15 or 20 people have a lot going on and marketing isn't what they're thinking about that often, but they're always thinking about their pipeline."
The campaign features a mini mockumentary and 60s, 30s, and 15s ads complemented by an in-depth’ how-to’ video.
And it took almost 18 months to bring the idea to life because it broke B2B advertising conventions.
“We said let's bring a level of consumer creativity into the B2B segment,” Joyce said.
“It was a very different approach for Google when it came to advertising Google Ads, therefore there were a lot of questions and additional research points along the way.
“We have done campaigns before that for Google Ads but with formal and earnest case study-esque versus really leaning into entertainment and trying to win people's attention.
“It was a long research and strategic journey to get to that point where we had the permission to really go after attention, entertain, drive the product as part of the narrative and deliver what has been a really successful campaign so far.”
Emotive deliberately leaned into comedy because to ensure the campaign was entertaining and embodied the Google brand personality.
Of all the ideas, the one that stuck was bringing Strzelecki back to screens around the country.
Pearson said it was important to intimately understand her world.
“It's not a reinvention of her character, but it's a continuation of her story and true to her world,” he said.
“I think being authentic to Shaz's character is pretty much everything because she is an icon and audiences are really brutal if they spot a fake in that regard.
“While it seems like it can seem like a no-brainer to take an established character and just build from that, it comes with quite a lot of risks, particularly when they are so very deeply part of the comedic consciousness of the country.”
Pearson said Szubanski was heavily involved in the creative process, saying “some great improv lines” emerged.
“You've got a very big client behind her, that's Google, so it very much had to be a scripted piece that we were working from,” he said.
“But we just wanted to make sure that as we built that out, she was very much across it and giving her input as well.”
Pearson said the team had several really robust sessions in the lead up to the two-day shoot.
“They degenerated into laughing fits at times, but they were sort of always trying to make sure that we were balancing what Sharon would do against what we're trying to achieve with it and what was going to be broadly entertaining,” he said.
“She loved ‘Bowled & Beautiful’ from the beginning and just helped build it out even further through many gags, lots of which were unusable because of being too naughty but lots that were usable, and we just tried to weave it through so it became a genuine collaboration between all of us.
“I don't think you could trace who did what by the end of it, in terms where ideas in that script came from, but that's a fantastic thing too because it means that you've got genuine buy-in from your talent.
“She's carrying the whole thing and we obviously wanted to build the world around her with quirky characters that felt very real to her.”
The campaign racked up more than 1.3million organic views in the first month and System One Testing showed 2.9x long-term market share growth compared to B2B advertising benchmarks.
While there are no confirmed plans to produce another Google Ad featuring Strzelecki, Joyce said the campaign has left people begging for more.
“If you go through the social comments there's a lot of people that would love to see a continuation of this story,” he said.
“We certainly haven't sort of explored the limit of where Sharon's going to go with this so I think we could look at a lot of different plot lines that fall out of this initial adventure.
“We would love to continue the adventure.”
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