The Ask
Help an audience find value in Google’s new AI voice assistant, Gemini Live.
Our Answer
Language barriers complicated almost every aspect of immigrants’ lives, leading them to rely on their English-speaking children. We showed them that a better solution existed: Gemini Live.
Client: Google
Live Client
Hey Gemini, how can I tell if something is spicy without tasting it?
Hey Gemini, how do I tell my roommates to do the dishes in the style of a video game trailer?
Hey Gemini, are oranges called oranges because oranges are orange?
Our Objective: Bring Gemini Live to an audience that needed it more than anyone else.
Google came to us asking how to sell Gen Z on their new AI voice assistant, Gemini Live. If we wanted to target someone else, we had to have a killer reason why.
To the left: the conversations Gemini Live was having in Google’s spots at the time of this project. While Gemini Live was a powerful tool, it had been reduced to answering trivial questions nobody asked in real life.
We knew we could prove Gemini Live was a product that actually mattered. To do this, we connected it to the audience that needed it more than anyone else.
Our Audience: Working-class immigrant families
We were intimately familiar with this audience.
As a team consisting of one 1st Gen and three 2nd Gen immigrants, these were our mothers, our fathers, our neighbors, and our friends. People close to our hearts.
That said, we still did our homework— looking extensively into their lives and uncovering four core understandings about immigrant families:
1. Immigrants were more likely to be working class and low-income.
2. Immigrants owned Androids (conveniently, Gemini Live came pre-installed on every Android).
3. Immigrants faced language and cultural barriers that complicated their everyday lives.
4. Immigrants believed the only way to overcome these barriers was to rely on their English-speaking children.
Immigrants were more likely than U.S. citizens to be employed in working-class jobs (construction, agriculture, service industries).
Kaiser Family Foundation
Even among those with college educations, immigrants (33%) were more likely to be low-income than their U.S. citizen counterparts (15%).
Social Security Administration
We found countless stories from children translators online. A common theme emerged: when immigrant parents couldn't understand, their children were forced to understand too much, too early. The parents were left powerless, and their children shouldered the responsibility.
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As the child of two Chinese immigrants, assisting my parents with language barriers was something I myself knew all too well. After my mother was diagnosed with cancer, before I could process this devastating news myself, it was my job to tell my father how much time we had left with her.
This fall, while I ducked out of class to take calls during my mother’s chemo sessions, my parents remained dependent on a daughter who lived on the opposite side of the country.
Our Insight: When facing language and cultural barriers, immigrants became over-dependent on their children's assistance.
We knew there had to be a better solution for the challenges they were facing. We knew there had to be a better solution for the challenges they were facing. This is where voice assistants, like Gemini Live, could come in.
Our Obstacle: Immigrant families didn’t yet know what set Gemini Live apart from other voice and translation assistants.
Our Answer: Gemini Live represented the perfect blend of advanced AI and accessibility.
Supports 40+ languages.
Natural, free-flowing conversations.
Transcript included.
Free to download.
Available on every Android (more affordable than iPhones).
Unlike with kids, you have 24/7 access.
Just directs you to the translate app instead.
Live Translation discontinued over a year ago.
Lacks conversational ability. Unable to translate culture.
$25/month.
Unfeasible for our working-class target audience.
“As an ESL speaker, Gemini helps me recognize common words that I don’t pronounce correctly. It helps elaborate on complex and technical lingo terms that I cannot fully understand the concept.”
With the help of Gemini Live, immigrants could:
Talk back and forth in their first language
Brainstorm how to write in a second language
Practice English aloud
Explore topics from a new culture
Just as crucially, our campaign showed that AI was something that augmented our humanity, rather than something that detracted from it.
Our Strategy:
With Gemini Live, speak the language of independence.
How We Got There:
We investigated what Gemini Live did better than any other AI; became experts on the immigrant experience — from policy research, Simmons, and social listening, to hearing the stories straight from immigrants themselves; proved the idea worked through user testing; pitched and produced our idea before Google came out with their beautiful 2025 Super Bowl spot.
What Came Out Of It:
Two elated clients. Six excited creatives from other teams who asked if they could work on this brief. Three members of the target audience who teared up during the presentation.
The Team:
Me (2nd Gen Immigrant); Hoang Ho (CW, 1st Gen Immigrant); Ella Gormanlove (AD); Rhiannon Newman (AD); Bibi Niraula (XD, 2nd Gen Immigrant); Himanish Goel (XD, 2nd Gen Immigrant)
Read the brief here.