Google Pixel

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SOCIAL MEDIA
CHANNEL LAUNCH
INFLUENCER

Launching a new Instagram handle seems like a pretty straightforward ask right? But we managed to make it tough for ourselves by choosing to curate 800,000+ images one by one and risking pissing off our entire fanbase by spamming their DM’s…

The Google Pixel is actually a great phone with a loyal following, but it definitely struggles against the big boys. We wanted to use those fans, known as #teampixel, to say ‘fuck it’, own the green bubble and not be shy to tell their mates they don’t have an iPhone.

We wanted to launch the channel in a pretty special way, so we downloaded the 800K+ #teampixel photos shared over the past two years. We used some fancy visual listening AI to first vet the images for things like guns, drugs and dongs. We tried to pick the best images purely by engagement but it turns out just because you have 5 thousand likes, doesn’t mean you know how to frame up a half decent picture. So my team and I clicked through the remaining images one-by-one to pick 100 of the most interesting and spectacular ones. We then organized them by color palette and arranged them with “blank” squares of color and shape to create a super long digital “gallery”.

We sliced the artwork up into about 500 images, wrote copy for each one, then uploaded them, manually, one-by-one, on a phone, in reverse order, while trying not to trip the Facebook spam algorithm. Which wasn’t stressful at all.

We had some fun by embedding Easter Eggs throughout the feed giving away dozens of brand new Pixel 3’s, to reward fans who actually scrolled and explored the gallery.

To invite all of #teampixel to this new channel and we wanted to DM every single one of them to personally invite them. Turns out Facebook considers a few hundred thousand messages sent from one account to be spam-like behavior and our legal team shot this idea down anyway. So instead we followed the 100 photographers whose work we were featuring and announced the new channel to Google fans on @google & @madebygoogle with the message “welcome home #teampixel.”

It was massively popular and we had a ton of fun browsing the channel on launch day watching people try to find the free phones and saying nice stuff about the idea of launching a channel this way. The first 5 days saw 75K visits, and the handle hit 100k followers in under two months.