When it comes to driving preference for Chrome among a sea of browser options, speed matters most. To get Chrome into culture where speed is already part of conversation, we connected our partnership with McLaren F1 (the fastest sport on earth) to the #openversechallenge trend on TikTok, where rappers drop bars and prompt others to duet with them. We aimed to create something fun that would engage people to join in on the fun.
But ours wasn’t just any open verse challenge. First, Chrome joined forces with F1 team McLaren and driver Lando Norris.Then, we came up with a challenge: could the world’s biggest rappers rap as fast as Lando drives? The MPH vs BPM challenge brought breakthrough star Lil Yachty and OG fast rapper Busta Rhymes together to create an original song. The song’s variable BPM matched the MPH of Lando's fastest lap around the track – and broke records as the first-ever song timed to an F1 driver’s speed. We timed the launch of our campaign against one of the biggest Grand Prix races of the year, Silverstone, when we knew social conversation around F1 and speed would be spiking. The campaign kicked off with a premium hero video, featuring Norris, Busta and Yachty, which Lil’ Yachty shared with his community of 2.95M YouTube subscribers and his 11.2MM Instagram followers that included a call to action for others to join the challenge.
On TikTok, we invited globally famous rappers and prominent TikTok creators to chime in with their own verses, each curated to embrace the theme of speed and call out key Chrome features. Then, users organically jumped into the challenge to create their own versus, creating a groundswell of engagement and conversation around speed.
The campaign resulted in 57.5MM views of our hashtag #ChromeSpeedChallenge, surpassed all Chrome engagement benchmarks and drove an overall increase in Google x McLaren earned mentions by 7440%. Most importantly, the campaign contributed to a +22% increase in Chrome’s perception as fast and a significant increase in the usage of Chrome.
