With an essential part of the brief being to demonstrate CLIF Bar’s definition of adventure, we thought it'd make more sense to think of ways the viewer could actively embrace that definition and be spontaneous rather than just sit back and watch another :60 spot. Instead of building a custom interface and microsite for viewers to engage with, and driving traffic there, we wanted to do something in the spaces our audience was already spending time. Once we figured out how to repurpose YouTube's annotation feature to fashion "buttons" and let the viewer choose their own path through our spot, we were off to collect approximately 70 zillion video clips from users and filmmakers.

Using standard YouTube annotations, albeit in a way unintended by YouTube, we built an 18-minute video packed with outdoor imagery, voiceover, and type that presents viewers with periodic choices: up or down, left or right, road or trail. The viewer clicks the appropriate box in the video player and is jumped through the timeline to the next corresponding clip. With over 40 distinct video adventure clips, all interconnected, the experience contained within a single YouTube video creates a near endless variety of possibilities. We sourced footage from a combination of CLIF Bar athletes, existing YouTube users and adventure filmmakers, as that felt more authentic to build our story with existing adventurers rather than staging adventure for the sake of advertising. To reach our audience where they already were, we heavied up our media buy on YouTube Reserve Pre-Roll teasers to attract users already on the site over to our experience.

Reach: Over 41MM video views

Engagement: CLIF set new industry records, driving our goal of increasing engagement. Our video had an unheard of average of 7:32 view time and a benchmark-setting view-through rate of 54%. Performance was so strong that the video had over 10 million minutes spent during our three-month campaign – that’s twenty+ years of time! (Source: DFA, YouTube).

Sales: CLIF jumped into the #3 spot for the July Shelf Score measuring purchase intent. This complemented a double-digit gain in sales compared to 2014.

But our primary mission was to increase brand equity: We tripled our brand favorability goal with a 14.8% lift for those exposed (Source: Nielsen/Vizu). We more than doubled our consideration goal with a lift of 5.9%. And we not only reached Google’s “Best In Class” benchmark for recall but saw it rise by 58.4%... Making this one of the most impactful campaigns of 2015.