What started as a vote on social media has become real-world fan merchandise, with Oscar Piastri attending the Canadian Grand Prix wearing the ‘The Piastee’, a t-shirt he designed in collaboration with Google Pixel.
Led by independent creative company Emotive and brought to life through Emotive Productions, the latest chapter of Google Pixel’s partnership with Piastri showed what can happen when audiences are invited to shape the idea, not just watch it.
Earlier this year, Google Pixel and Piastri launched their partnership via a film showing that ‘switching things up’ can lead to something great. A few months later, they collaborated again – this time to create ‘The Piastee’, where Piastri partnered with Pixel to switch up another part of his life: his famously understated fashion.
Piastri created three t-shirt designs with the help of his Pixel 10 Pro, inspired by internet-fuelled fan lore such as his much-memed reaction to the Austrian jetpack incident and his beloved pet dog Basil. Then, he put the designs to a social vote. More than 12,000 votes were cast, with a croissant-inspired tee (a nod to his ‘Oscar Pastry’ nickname) officially crowned the winning design and becoming ‘The Piastee’.
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After fans flooded social media asking for the tee to become real merchandise, Google Pixel and the McLaren F1 driver responded by putting it into production. Influencers began wearing it, giveaways rolled out across social, and the shirt ultimately made its way onto the biggest stage of all: Piastri wearing it at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Now, due to the warm reception from his fans, it’s available as official fan merch on Piastri’s online store.
At the centre of the work is a simple truth that has fuelled the partnership from the start: Oscar Piastri’s understated personality is one of the most loved parts of his public identity. While racing is often defined by noise and ego, Piastri’s calm, dry and quietly self-aware persona has created an incredibly engaged fan community that actively looks for, shares and amplifies the internet lore surrounding him.
The campaign leaned directly into that behaviour, turning fan observations and in-jokes into something tangible people could shape, vote on, wear and share.
“The most exciting part of this campaign was watching the audience take it somewhere bigger than we originally imagined. It started with fans voting on a t-shirt. Then they wanted it made for real. Then the internet started treating it like actual merch before it even existed. That level of participation is incredibly hard to force, but when you create something people genuinely want to engage with, it can move from content into culture very quickly,” said Jessica Cluff, head of earned creative at Emotive.
“At its core, this partnership is focussed on getting consumers to question why they would ever want anything less than ‘the best’, a mindset that Oscar shares and exemplifies on and off the track. This new work demonstrates Oscar being willing to switch things up once again, this time in a light-hearted and playful way that leans into his deep connection with fans and showcases the powerful capabilities of our flagship Pixel devices,” added director of Google’s devices marketing, Julia Davis.
The work was developed through Emotive’s integrated model, with creative and production working as one across Emotive Creative Agency and Emotive Productions. By keeping ‘idea’ and ‘making’ closely connected from the outset, the team was able to move quickly from social interaction to physical production, creator seeding, merchandise development and earned rollout.
The partnership continues to build on Google Pixel’s global platform encouraging consumers to ‘ask more of their phone’, brought to life through a distinctly Australian lens.
Credits:
Client: Google Australia
Creative Agency: Emotive
Production Company: Emotive Productions
