Brand
Media & Production
Helping Google show up for cultural moments and communities
Project Types
Culture and trends
The challenge

The Brand Studio team oversees Google’s engagement with key events in the US and global calendars - from Pride and Black History Month, to the Olympics and Earth Day - a diverse range of activities, each with their own passionate advocates and critics. The team wanted to learn more about the broader cultural ecosystem around each ‘moment’, to ensure their activations and campaigns were as impactful as possible.

Our approach

Canvas8 served as an ongoing research partner for Google’s Brand Studio team. Through an ongoing series of reports, we helped Google build a living ‘ecosystem’ of analytical, nuanced cultural insight and strategy around each moment, making sure that every brand initiative was grounded in deep understanding of real-world needs in specific communities or issue-areas.

  • Cultural context-mapping across our proprietary insight Library, as well as third-party sources, reports and statistics.
  • Expert intelligence from a curated panel of thought leaders and activists.
  • Bespoke surveying of everyday Americans.
  • Media monitoring, social listening and sentiment analysis - leveraging AI-powered media and social data across huge global databases.
  • Exploratory methodologies - from user keyword testing to cultural forecasting.
Output
  • A series of over thirty bespoke reports to help guide Google’s involvement in cultural moments.
  • Various macro-reports on broad cultural topics of strategic interest.
Results
  • For over two years, our work has informed high-level planning and strategy within Google’s marketing organization, helping to amplify the company’s brand commitments.
  • These reports continue to help Google feed cultural insight into planning, and keep real audience needs at the heart of their activations.
Can we help?