Young girls today face a self-esteem crisis. From body image issues to bullying, many grow up facing serious concerns, magnified by our social-media centric world. YouTube wanted to create a campaign that would inspire these girls, by tapping into the intense fan-creator relationships that exist on our platform. By launching this campaign, we hoped to counteract negative publicity around cyberbullying by spotlighting the positivity that happens everyday on YouTube.

As an open and democratic platform, we also wanted to counteract mainstream stereotypes around women and inspire young girls by presenting a diverse spectrum of female experiences, perspectives and advice that they could relate to.

To achieve this, we launched #DearMe. The idea was simple: If you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, what advice would you give her? YouTube creators are the role models for today’s teenagers, so we asked our top female creators to create personal videos answering this question. We edited their responses into a hero spot that we promoted and also coordinated with all our creators to share their own videos along with a CTA for fans to contribute their own #DearMe advice.

While we didn’t face restrictions on political freedoms or civil liberties in the markets where we ran the campaign, we believe that #DearMe can easily be customized and launched in countries where there is political oppression to give women a voice and champion the liberties that every human being should have.

What started as an initiative with our YouTube community transcended into pop culture, with the hashtag #DearMe trending globally on Twitter for 23 hours. The initiative spurred over 4.5M views of our hero video, hundreds of thousands of tweets and social postings with an estimated 3B impressions, tremendously positive press coverage from 160+ global press hits including a major segment on Good Morning America, and thousands of #DearMe videos offering heartfelt, hard won advice from the global community.

The campaign's popularity inspired many other brands to piggyback, including Coca-Cola, North Face, Barbie, Luna Bars, Bebe and more.

But the best part of #DearMe? Its ability to unite a community of role models to inspire, encourage and elevate young girls worldwide.

In the US, mainstream media oversexualizes women, and young girls are taught that being pretty and popular are more important than being smart, assertive or pursuing serious interests. Female empowerment campaigns have focused on counteracting these mainstream notions, but they typically push a singular notion of what it means to be empowered, featuring one type of role model that may not be relatable to everyone.

#DearMe is significant because we highlighted and encouraged perspectives from women and men from all walks of life, including many underrepresented segments in mainstream media. Ours is the only campaign that represented personal advice not only from top YouTube creators, but also senior citizens, the deaf community, athletes in the special Olympics, and girls dealing with self-harm, right alongside videos from leaders like Michelle Obama and Sally Jewell, the Secretary of the Interior; fashion icons like Lorraine Candy, the editor in chief of ElleUK; and prominent journalists, actresses and women in business.

The strategy for #DearMe was to tap into the intense fan-creator relationships that exist on YouTube, where today’s generation of teenagers are watching, subscribing and interacting constantly with their favorite creators. We knew that if our top female creators spoke out about their personal experiences growing up and offered heart-felt advice to their younger selves, their millions of fans would listen and respond on social media.

The YouTube brand is rooted in being an open, democratic and participatory platform, where everyone’s voice can be heard. For our campaign, we wanted to ensure that we presented a multi-faceted view of what it means to be an empowered woman, by highlighting many different perspectives from our relatable role models.

#DearMe didn’t push a specific empowerment message -- it was completely up to the creator to shape what their advice to their fans would be. We launched with personal videos from 40 top creators around the world, and the diversity of perspectives and stories -- everything from dealing with bullying, finding your self-confidence, discovering life is about standing out, realizing you’re gay, worrying about your skin color and much more -- meant that there was something for everyone.

At the same time, we made it extremely easy for our users to participate and share their own #DearMe advice via our strong social media activation and our custom GIF maker. #DearMe advice from women and men from all walks of life poured in, a perfect testament to YouTube’s values of being open, democratic and participatory.