Our audience didn’t know where to put a smart screen, what it could do, or why they needed another new tech thing in their homes. Screen fatigue is on the rise, so marketing a new screen is an uphill battle. To drive consideration for the launch of the Google Home Hub, we applied an innovative approach to create a better ad experience that could truly break through. We picked moments where the Home Hub shined and matched them with how-to searches on YouTube to give people a preview of when it would make a big difference. We had to overcome the consumer apathy to another new screen and breakthrough during the busy holiday season while redefining what’s possible with dynamic advertising to benefit brand and audience alike.

We had a hypothesis that hyper-contextualized bumpers on YouTube would help our message break through. So to launch the Google Home Hub, a new product in a new category, we used the Director’s Mix tool to create a new kind of YouTube pre-roll: personalized, helpful, and compact — just like the Google Home Hub. We used data from YouTube to understand what consumers would be searching for and then developed a template that allowed us to be part of the answer. By being there in the moment when a home cook is in a time of need, and when people were searching for smart home hacks like spreading holiday cheer, we turned an ad into a live demo.

In order to leverage actual search data, we'd have to use dynamic technology to achieve true personalization at scale -- otherwise, that data would not have been actionable.

Using publically-available YouTube data we understood what our audience’s top YouTube searches would be during the duration of the campaign. We matched those searches with the most compelling use cases where Home Hub excelled. We used YouTube’s Director Mix tool to create dozens of :06 video bumpers against the most relevant seasonal Home Hub use cases to show how the Home Hub device could be helpful in specific moments at home. If you searched for videos about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey, we wanted to show you how Home Hub would help with that.

In order to leverage actual search data, we'd have to use dynamic technology to achieve true personalization at scale -- otherwise, that data would not have been actionable.

We knew we needed to demonstrate the enormous value Home Hub provides users in little moments throughout the day. Knowing we would best connect to our audience on YouTube, we leveraged Google’s Director Mix technology to match scores of creative directions centered around the relevance of Home Hub in specific micro moments to content that would create millions of personally relevant connections in our audience’s lives.

Using YouTube we understood what our audience’s top YouTube searches would be during the duration of the campaign. We matched those searches with the most compelling use cases where Home Hub excelled. We used YouTube’s Director Mix tool to create dozens of :06 video bumpers against the most relevant seasonal Home Hub use cases to show how the Home Hub device could be helpful in specific moments at home. If you searched for videos about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey, we wanted to show you how Home Hub would help with that.

We created a carefully curated schedule for the launches of the variety of Director Mix videos to match the videos with specific events such as Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday and Christmas to drive relevancy and recognition of use cases by audiences. For example, three days before Thanksgiving, a user will see our bumper showing Home Hub giving you a YouTube video on “how to brine a Turkey” and during December audiences will see more relevant videos such as “Light the Christmas Tree” and “Add Nutmeg to the Shopping List”

Utilizing these relevant use cases, we targeted the keywords across YouTube, reached audiences watching contextually relevant videos and appeared in front of smart home enthusiast audiences. The close relationship between creative, audience targeting and the features of the Home Hub helped drive both understanding and consideration of the product (4% lift).

We ran a lot of online video in this campaign and it was all good creative with a specific job to do. However, the only creative that beat awareness benchmarks on YouTube and drove the consideration lift (of 4%) as was the campaign goal were our Director Mix bumpers. The generic bumpers with no contextualized targeting generated no lift.

The close relationship between creative, audience targeting and the features of the Home Hub helped drive both understanding and consideration of the product. Our awareness lift was above YouTube’s benchmark.