Google Home, one of Google's latest products, is a voice-activated smart speaker that answers questions, helps manage tasks, and plays music on command. The company recently chose to highlight the latter feature—and in turn promote its music-streaming service Google Play Music—with two block-party-theme consumer experiences that showed how Google Home and Google Play Music work together.
Experiential marketing company Grow Marketing designed both activations, which came to Abbot Kinney in Los Angeles from February 11 to 12 and Chelsea Market in New York from February 24 to 26. "Google has an amazing portfolio of products that work really well together. And we felt the best way to truly demonstrate the ‘magic’ of Google is to allow people to touch, hear, see, and experience it firsthand for themselves," said Dee Dee Paeseler, product marketing manager for Google Home. "We developed this event to show how our hardware and services work seamlessly together through the lens of music, using Google Home and Google Play Music."
To creatively demonstrate how the two products interacted with each other, Grow Marketing built three tiny homes inspired by popular YouTube personalities and their channels: baker and author Elise Strachan of MyCupcakeAddiction; filmmakers Wesley Chan, Ted Fu, and Philip Wang of Wong Fu Productions; and folk music duo Michael and Carissa Alvarado of Us the Duo.
"It was important to ground these experiences in real-life use cases of real-life people," said Paeseler. "We sought YouTube creators because they were perfectly poised to show their wide audience how they use our products in their own lives."
In each home, product specialists demonstrated how the two products interacted, noted the personal touches from each YouTube creator, and allowed attendees to test out Google Home themselves. The homes also featured custom videos made by the YouTube personalities, showing how they used the products together. Product specialists also were on site to give advice and tips to interested consumers.
Here's a look at the different ways Google showed off the two products at its first-ever block party events.
