YouTube is often viewed as full of homemade and low quality content. In order to combat this perception, we came up with a relevant idea to the Spanish audience.

With the help of the Royal Academy of Language Arts, we kicked off the world’s first online read-aloud of Don Quijote, a collaborative effort on YouTube. Thousands of people signed up to read a piece of the story. In just a few days, we had received thousands of videos from Spanish speakers from all around the world. The Institute of Cervantes Studies had the task of choosing the 2,267 best video read-aloud clips from the massive stock that poured in. These videos would make up the most universal version of Don Quijote ever assembled.

The event activation lasted one month.It all began on a dedicated YouTube channel where we allowed users to choose a passage from Don Quijote from Google Books to read over a webcam. This would eventually form part of the entire novel.

We announced the event to Spanish media outlets at a press conference at the Royal Academy Language Arts.We came up with an ad campaign that appeared on YouTube and Google for one week.We created special events at the major Spanish universities, where students partcipated live in this important project.

Once we had received all the video readings, the Institute of Cervantes Studies chose the 2,267 best-read passages to complete the most comprehensive version of Don Quijote in history. These clips were compiled by the Royal Academy of Language Arts and will live on the Internet for the rest of time.

The first objective was to collect readings of the 2,267 passages necessary to finish the complete video of Don Quijote.We received over 9,000 videos and went through each and every one to choose the readings that worked best with the text of the novel.We got nearly 4.5 million hits on our YouTube channel and there are over 1.6 million search results on Google on the event.With a modest media budget and a powerful PR campaign, we made it right up there with the biggest campaigns and best ideas of the year.