World Cup Trends
Google wanted to be relevant during the 2014 World Cup without being a sponsor. So we used search data to offer a fun and unique glimpse into what the world really wanted to know during the tournament. We built an editorial website focused on the search trends of competing nations, highlighting which team was more popular, which players were trending, the mood of each nation and the questions they were asking. Accompanying this were bite-sized, sharable stories that were designed to go on Google’s social feeds and beyond. These positioned Google at the centre of World Cup debates online and in pubs worldwide.
We created all of this content in real-time, before, during, and after matches. A team of writers, designers, data analysts, translators and more watched and worked through every single match to turn data into content. We would think up an idea based on the match and then dig into the data to see if people were searching for our hunch. If they were then I’d get to work on writing a headline and partnering with an illustrator to create a visual that complemented the concept. Google had never done anything like it, and it was a massive success. We even had media outlets like HBO and Sports Illustrated requesting custom posts from us, alongside requests from players like Mesut Özil, Juan Cuadrado and Lukas Podolski.
The site we built was designed to give people a snapshot of how a country felt at that moment and to reveal what they really wanted to know about the game. We’d take the sentiment of searches from a country and use it to determine the national mood, alongside a number of more traditional match-related facts. I wrote all of the copy for the site.
I developed and pitched the concept for the project with my creative partner and worked as the lead Copywriter across the entire project. After launching the site, we worked every day of the World Cup as part of a team finding, writing and illustrating over 250 of the ‘trends’. Google then asked us to turn our creations into a bespoke book that was gifted to players and football journalists as a memento of the tournament.