Entertainment > Branded Content & Visual Storytelling
GOOGLE, Los Angeles / GOOGLE / 2016
Overview
Credits
CampaignDescription
Moon Shot is a character driven series of 9 short films that follows a selection of teams currently racing to complete their missions. It explores the lives of their charismatic, quirky members, the sacrifices made to get to where they are today, and crucially, what drives them on this incredible journey.
Execution
The Moon Shot trailer was released on Thursday March 3, along with an official Google Blog Post, Moon Shot : A Space Story About Life On Earth. The series premiered at SXSW on Monday, March 14, with a Moon Shot SXSW panel, introduced by J.J. Abrams, a private showing at The Violet Crown Cinema for cast, crew, and media, and an afterparty at The Belmont. On Tuesday, March 15, the Moon Shot series was released on Google Play, and on Thursday, March 17, the series, now available in 39 languages, was released on YouTube.
Outcome
The Moon Shot series and trailer have a collective 2.8 million views from 230 countries on YouTube. The GLXP Moon Shot channel experienced > 7 years of watch time in just 3 weeks, and the female viewership on the channel is now 2x higher than it was before the release. The series generated 822 unique PR stories globally, with 47% of the coverage coming from outside the United States. The social posts promoting the series had 13,816 post engagement, 3,425 post shares/retweets, with 93% positive or neutral sentiment.
Relevancy
Moon Shot explores the Google Lunar XPrize, an unprecedented worldwide competition offering $30 million to the first private team to build and land a rover on the moon. The teams are comprised of hundreds of people: engineers, roboticists, mathematicians, designers and more. To humanize their efforts and connect with viewers, each film in the Moon Shot series focuses on a single individual from each team. The films capture the deeper story about these individuals, emphasizing their personal sacrifices and struggles as they attempt to do what's never been done before.
Strategy
Since its conception in 2007, there has been little general awareness about the Lunar XPrize competition. In 2014, the Google brand marketing team began exploring the possibility of making a documentary series to tell the stories behind those competing. Google sent a small crew to capture a few teams’ stories and edited them into a sizzle reel. The reel caught the attention of the production company, who brought it to J.J. Abrams. After the partnership was in place, the team recruited Academy Award® nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel to direct the series. During the director selection process, a researcher traveled around the world, meeting with teams and finding stories. Filming and postproduction took place in fall 2015 and winter 2015/16.
Synopsis
Since 2007, 16 private teams from around the world have been in a race to the moon, competing for the $30 million prize. Their challenge is to design and build a rover, land it on the surface of the moon, drive it 500 meters across the lunar landscape, and send HD video and imagery back to Earth by the end of 2017. The teams come from all walks of life, from Silicon Valley tech experts, to hackers in Germany, to IT specialists in India, to a father and son working out of their Vancouver apartment.
In a series of 9 documentaries from Google, Academy Award® nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel and Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Moon Shot goes behind the scenes with each team, bringing to life their challenges, sacrifices, quirks, and most importantly, the reasons why they’re making the 238,900 mile journey to the moon.
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