Nils Leonard, founder of Uncommon London: Not making a choice is your choice.
So you deciding that you’re not sure yet whether you want to play a part in the world
is you basically saying, “I don’t.”
[voice-over, reassuring and confident] It’s okay not to know.
To be curious.
Nishma Patel Robb, senior director, brand and reputation marketing at Google: So the core idea
of this work was really to reflect behavior that we saw around confessional search: the moments
we turn to Google to ask those questions where we don’t necessarily quite understand or know.
Leonard: Being able to search for anything at any time in the world is
a really powerful thing. The questions you ask and the things you search for
are really, really powerful indicators of the world that we live in.
And we were obsessed with that sort of idea and wanted to get to something. So when we landed on
“The more we learn, the closer we get,” we sort of thought that was really powerful.
If you could see in a snapshot the different things everybody was searching for, you’d realize
how vulnerable we all were, how fragile we all were, but, ultimately, how we all wanted to learn.
Patel Robb: Why do footballers take the knee? What does it mean
to be anti-racist? You don’t want to play to the culture wars. You
don’t want to feed and fan that, and you definitely don’t want to force division.
What you want to demonstrate is, actually, there’s a lot of movement in this idea of unity.
Leonard: People searching for, “can I say wagwan”? That question provoked people
we’d never even thought of to get involved and go well, “Can I?”, and “Why can’t I?”,
and “What are you on about?”, and “Why have you asked that, Google?”
All those brilliant things. So it engaged people in a way that we hadn’t seen coming.
[voice-over, warm and comforting] To wonder what that is.
Patel Robb: Putting a voice over a film like that: “Whose voice is it?”
Marcus Rashford is a phenomenal footballer but has been a role model, a beacon for progress.
Leonard: We were worried at one point that the involvement of Marcus would mean it became
a celebrity ad, but we were all open to it because the end game was still the
same. Yeah, Marcus arguably is asking some of the biggest questions in this
country with some of the stuff he’s doing. So it felt very appropriate.
Video, film, whatever you want to call it, is still the most powerful place to tell a
story in a short form. We were over the moon that we were going to play out on YouTube,
because that’s a format that travels probably the fastest in the world for any video content.
Patel Robb: But it also gave an opportunity to ensure that you get more view-throughs of
the kind of longer form film to make more sense of the 30-second ones you
were seeing in TV. And so the breadth of the opportunity of storytelling is vast.
Leonard: There’s what you say, and then there’s how you say it. And I think the point is to
use music and film and story. I think all of that stuff, if you get all that right,
it asks a conversation the right way. There’s a brilliant quote from Saul Williams, which is,
“Legislation won’t necessarily start a riot, but the right song can make someone pick up a chair.”
Patel Robb: Using that drop of the beat, and then you bring in the search product,
and you show the resolve to the answers with the pace then building to that final
part with Marcus. In the past, we hadn’t used music quite in that way.
[voice-over] Marcus Rashford MBE, footballer: After all,
it’s not our questions that define us. It’s what we do with the answers.
Patel Robb:
We were very conscious of, this work is not performative.
This work was an exploration of a human truth:
that we are curious, and want to learn and understand, and that leads somewhere good.
One of the bits of research we did when someone said, “If I can’t ask my friend, I ask Google.”
We present answers without judgment.
So our purpose for this campaign was not to preach, but it was to be able to present
people with the answers that empowers them to then take whatever action they’re after.
Leonard: The more we are starting these conversations, the more we care about
the world around us, the more we want to impact on it, and leave it better, or just change it,
the more powerful we’ll be. Should you think about purpose? Should you try to matter in the world?
Are you (beep) kidding? What, do you want to just wake up and like sell cheese? What is your dream?
You get a limited amount of time in your work, and what do you want to do with that time, other than
just earn some money? And in our jobs, by the way, we can do far more than just make adverts.