Google promotes vaccines with emotional “Get back to what you love” video

Over the weekend, Google began promoting a video it released last week, in an attempt to encourage users to take the novel coronavirus vaccines. The video titled “Get back to what you love” is exactly one minute long, but manages to pack in a powerful message.

Getting people all over the world to take the vaccine is a difficult task, and the search giant has started its awareness efforts with the US, a country with a large number of citizens that do not believe in the efficacy of vaccines. Instead of focusing on hard statistics and numbers, Google has taken a personal approach with this short ad.

The one minute video starts with the company’s ubiquitous search homepage, where various search terms are displayed in the bar, and then edited. There’s an animation of the terms ‘quarantine’ and ‘social distancing’ being deleted via the backspace key, while another animation shows the words ‘school closings’, and ‘restrictions de voyage’ selected with the cursor and then deleted.

The video goes on to show Google Calendar entries containing terms that we’ve all gotten used to during the last year, after spending most of our days indoors - virtual happy hour, fiesta virtual, and virtual playdate. Another animation then deletes the word ‘virtual’ from all of them and then cuts to the second half of the video.

Also read: Facebook launches new profile frames, sticker to encourage Covid-19 vaccination

The video picks up pace, showing various locations on Google Maps like a restaurant, a theater and more opening up instead of being “temporarily closed” - these are shown in various languages including Spanish and Mandarin. The company then delivers the final punch in the last part, showing a view of the search bar with an animation of the words “covid vaccine near me” being searched.

There are over five hundred comments on the video, most of them appreciating the video calling it powerful, that it made them cry, or saying they would share it elsewhere. At the time of writing this article, it had racked up a total of 47.55 lakh views on YouTube, barely a week after it was posted.