Google Neighbourhood

Brief: Make Old Street Roundabout a beacon for Google and our products throughout the year, increasing cut-through with an always-on, 100% owned piece of media. For the whole of 2015, Google owned 100% share of voice of the 4 large, prominent and very visible digital screens in the centre of Old Street Roundabout. They asked R/GA to deliver a year long, always-on content solution to ensure the screens always felt relevant, fresh and up to date. Our solution was to create a series of dynamic templates which automatically update with content based on changing conditions like time of day, trending events and news, local events and listings, and weather conditions. We turned 'Silicon Roundabout' into a connected space, giving the Old Street community useful information about their local area, and giving back to local shops and small businesses in the area by highlighting local events and listings and promoting their activity. As a result, we ensured that Google became a valued part of the Old Street community, transforming the roundabout into a central noticeboard for the local area. Throughout the year, we also ran product campaigns on the screens, but our objective was to ensure that these campaigns didn’t feel like ‘advertising’, but were a valuable contribution to the Old Street community. A great example of this was the Android Old Street Locals campaign. We met dozens of real people from the local area who were Android users, interviewed them and discovered what made them “not the same” (part of the Android mantra), and then created Androidified characters of them, sharing their individual story with the community on the big screen. From the local lollipop lady to the pie shop owner, from the weighlifting accountant to the street artist, the stories we created showed the rich diversity of the local Old Street local community and brought the locals closer together.