Googlies, Ganguly and exasperated cricketers: Google India’s bid to make search fun again

Watching Sourav Ganguly annoy fellow cricketers with goolyesque questions while fiddling with Google search is endearing. It evokes the image of an indulgent father chuckling at his own pun, the kind of dad joke that is more charming than funny.  

Perhaps that is what Google India had in mind when it asked Bare Bones Collective, a young independent creative agency, to create the second edition of its Googlies on Google campaign. The first edition was released in 2024.

Girish Narayandass, the agency’s co-founder and chief creative officer, says the brief was straightforward: “We want a social-first campaign to get people excited about Google.”

That may strike some as unnecessary. Google, after all, dominates the global search engine market. Yet rivals are encroaching. E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, short-video apps like TikTok and Instagram, and a growing crop of generative AI tools including ChatGPT and Perplexity are increasingly chipping away at the time and queries once directed Google's way. The company has its own chatbot, Gemini.

Googlies on Google is one way the technology giant is trying to inject a bit of fun back into its crown jewel. A gamified feature, Googly serves up unexpected answers to quirky and sometimes thought-provoking questions, offering just enough intrigue to keep users coming back.

Designing the campaign as a “social first” initiative helps ensure it reaches all kinds of users, since nearly everyone now spends time on social media. It is, after all, the age of the scroll.

The choice to feature cricketers all comfortably over 40 was no accident. “100% deliberate,” says Narayandass. “We thought it would be cool to bring our childhood heroes together and evoke a sense of nostalgia.”

One could reasonably assume the campaign’s main target is millennials, given that the cast featuring Kumble, Sehwag, Watson, Kaif, and Morgan were in their prime when the target group was in its teens.

Narayandass disagrees. “We are not specifically targeting millennials,” he says, noting that these stars resonate with multiple generations. “I know Sunil Gavaskar even though I have never watched him play. Still, I understand the place he holds in Indian cricket.”

Thanks to the campaign’s social-first approach, the co-founder believes the cricketers' legacy will reach a broader audience. He points to actress Zeenat Aman, a Gen Z favourite, much of whose appeal can be attributed to her Instagram presence.

Small agency, big virals: The story behind Bare Bones Collective

When creating this campaign, Bare Bones Collective ensured the idea and writing were shareable. Otherwise, what is the point of a social-first approach? Narayandass believes people are more passive and forgiving as television viewers, but “on social, it’s brutal.” 

One such stimulus to a campaign’s shareability is the use of pop culture references or mentions that only those in the know can understand. For instance, many wouldn’t know Ganguly calls Sehwag a nawab in the ad because the latter’s nickname is the Nawab of Najafgarh, the town where he was born.

Several ad campaigns follow a similar route these days, raising the question of whether such a copy choice has become the easy and preferred option, given the sheer number of ads that drop online. “It is a tool,” says the co-founder, adding that it alone “will not make your ad film shareable. The idea and the writing are still the king.”

But what happens when the idea king demands multiple ad films for a campaign, rather than a single piece? Someone who watches the second ad without having seen the first will likely feel lost. “That is something you do consciously, and you hope it works,” admits Narayandass.

That said, he acknowledges the power of social. “If you’re curious about the piece and wonder why Ganguly is apologising to Kumble, you’ll think, ‘Let me Google this…’”

And while you are at it, there is another ad in the campaign that features not a cricketer but shooter and Olympian Manu Bhaker. It seems Ganguly is not content with teasing only cricketers; he is democratic with his Googlies from Google.