It wasn’t ever going to be enough to simply create a clever idea that charmed advertisers. We needed to marry breakthrough creative with hard-hitting data points that could make real difference to their clients.

We started by identifying the most compelling audience insights from over four years of mining against the most valuable audiences (Young Parents, Gen X, Millennials, Sports Fans, Gamers, Beauty, and DIY).

We then created a robust that married big data learnings with just the right disruptive video asset from the infinite library of YouTube content. Each statistic was the foundation of each creative execution.

Using the most popular content on YouTube, we created fourteen films that highlighted a unique audience and their behavior on the platform.

To ensure we connected with an ever-time-starved audience, we embraced a new YouTube media unit, the :06 bumper ad, to tell our stories.

Guaranteeing The Right Audience

The media plan anchored against Advertising Week NYC, with a six-week flight of hyper-targeted digital media.

We built data-driven targeting across Google, social and trade media in the following ways:

YouTube — target advertisers via interest and custom affinity, topic targeting.

GDN & DBM — retargeting based on search using Xad.

Linkedin — job specific targeting.

Twitter — promoted posts targeting followers of top industry influencers.

Digital Trade Media like AdWeek, AdAge, WSJ, etc.

The data driven results of this campaign directly impacted the advertiser experience and behavior. The bumpers reached approximately 70% of our audience and 60% recalled seeing the ads. The Twitter benchmark blew up, elevating 271%, which is 6,000% higher than average number of engagements per post on our own Twitter handle. Advertisers who recalled the ads indicated the ads were likeable (74%) and thought the message was clear (80%). Not only did marketers like the ads, they finally saw YouTube as the advertiser’s dream we’d always hoped the would with 1.2X more positive perceptions in YouTube's ability to help them reach their audiences, 1.3X more positive perceptions in YouTube’s effectiveness at achieving business results, 1.5X more positive perceptions in YouTube as essential for building a brand and 1.6X more positive perceptions in YouTube as an advertising platform they trust. In the end, we showed advertisers that YouTube isn’t a black box, but rather a coveted destination where the world’s most coveted target audiences come to watch and the world’s most coveted brands come to advertise.