In partnership with Childish Gambino (Donald Glover), Google Pixel created a first-of-its-kind AR meets AI experience, an innovation at the intersection of technology and culture to bring AR to life in a new way. We launched the Childish Gambino Playmoji campaign at the 2019 Grammys with a TV spot of Gambino performing a dance off with his Playmoji. We leveraged the cultural conversation around Gambino’s record breaking Grammys win and no-show to command attention. We encouraged fans around the world to grab their Pixel, download the Playmoji, and try out their own AR dance cover. By tapping into influencers, we sparked the #pixeldanceoff, leading to over 180% increase in Pixel social mentions, 220% increase in Playground usage and nearly 500 million impressions overall. Ultimately, the experience led to people around the world sharing their dance moves, showing the amazing things we can do when bringing tech, music, and art together.

The Childish Gambino Playmoji represents the best of Google’s AR and AI capabilities joining forces. Each move and expression was motion captured with Gambino himself and rendered using Google’s AR platform, ARCore. The Playmoji animates Gambino’s most popular dances and shows both reactionary expressions and candid moments. Our goal was to bring this innovation into the real world for people to experience firsthand. To kick it off, we implemented the Playmoji in a TV spot that featured Gambino’s avatar as an enhanced motion graphical representation of the Playmoji, moving and reacting alongside the real Gambino in a dance off. To scale our launch, we tapped a global team of influencers to share their own dance off, sparking #pixeldanceoff and leading to over 600+ UGC videos within days of launch. This increased relevance for the Pixel brand, yielding over 220% increase in Playground usage and 18% immediate increase in Pixel searches.