PUMA’s YouTube Arsenal advertising campaign ran from July 10 through August 20, 2014. Based on the data-driven strategy of PUMA’s ad tech partner, PUMA was able to accomplish its Arsenal launch campaign goals and serve its new Arsenal ads to an engaged, 89% male YouTube audience of international football enthusiasts aged 7-34.

The follow-on view rate (i.e. the percentage of viewers who voluntarily watched additional PUMA videos after being served an initial paid ad) was 53%, which was a massive benchmark of success for PUMA. This high rate of follow-on viewing clearly demonstrated that the campaign audience enjoyed a more positive experience by being exposed to content they cared deeply about. Comments left under the videos also demonstrated positive audience sentiment.

In just six weeks, PUMA’s Arsenal campaign accounted for 4,500,000 new minutes of video watch time and generated 393,000,000 new impressions for PUMA. By December 2014, PUMA’s YouTube channel had experienced 141% year-over-year growth, expanding from 27,172,452 total views in 2013 to 65,574,899 total views in 2014. This channel growth significantly surpassed that of its competitors, including Nike and Reebok.

The Arsenal kit launch campaign delivered 1,600,000 paid views, and generated an additional 1,730,000 organic views (creating a rare ratio of 1 paid view : 1.08 organic views) as a result of hyper-targeting specific subsets of YouTube’s passionate football community.

Thousands of users Liked and shared PUMA’s Arsenal videos and subscribed to PUMA’s YouTube channel. The rise in audience engagement attributable to the campaign—a key success metric for PUMA—amounted to 271% increased Likes, 2315% increased comments, 3293% increased shares, 596% increased views, and 396% more minutes watched.

The Arsenal YouTube campaign was PUMA’s best performing campaign of all time, and beat all industry benchmarks as well as previous PUMA campaign benchmarks for audience engagement.

PUMA’s Arsenal spots are engaging and visually appealing, but creative that an audience is unable to understand—no matter how innovative—is unlikely to be effective. Although the spots themselves were created by PUMA, PUMA’s ad tech partner delivered key insights which allowed the brand to make data-based decisions including:

• Languages to translate the spots into

• Which countries to release in

• Which YouTube videos to target against

• Which members of YouTube’s football community to target based on indications of their receptiveness to PUMA’s message.

Using this data, PUMA was able to: pinpoint precisely where Arsenal and general football fans were located around the world, and what YouTube content they spent their time watching; and identify which YouTube executions and placements PUMA should deploy to develop sustained engagement with the fan community. These data-driven insights were the key to the overall success of PUMA’s historic launch.

Data drove the targeting decisions for the campaign. Geographic targeting was based on the three main location tiers of Arsenal and football fans:

1. Primary Tier: UK, USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, China, Japan, and South Korea

2. Middle East, Benelux, Nordics, Germany, Nigeria, Kenya, and Brazil

3. France, Spain, and Italy

Based on the audience, targeting, and placement insights the software gathered from YouTube’s football community, PUMA’s partner set up additional sub-campaigns for the Arsenal launch targeted by:

• Granular demographic groups

• Football topics and interest groups

• Arsenal-related keywords, such as “Gunners,” “Arsenal FC,” etc.

• Competitor brand keywords

• Top PUMA Arsenal players, such as “Arteta,” “Flamini,” “Cazorla,” etc.

• Popular Arsenal placements

• Translated keywords

• Retargeting

PUMA’s industry benchmark-beating Arsenal launch YouTube advertising strategy, targeting, and YouTube media execution was shaped by the pre-launch extensive data gathering and analysis.