Gone are the days where glossy magazine pages and celebrity opinion drive influence for young women. As Variety magazine’s 2014 and 2015 research on teen influence reported, YouTube creators have been building credibility with millions of fans through simply being themselves. Through transparency, empathy, and humor, YouTube has become the go-to destination for young women to find authentic relationships.

And thus Margot vs Lily, Nike’s first-ever original branded-entertainment series for YouTube, was born.

The story focuses on a bet between two rival sisters: a socially awkward YouTube star and an exercise-averse party girl. At its core, the show is about fitness, but it touches on how every aspect of a woman’s life—career, interests, relationships—is better when she takes risks and makes the effort to improve.

Over the course of the eight-episode rollout, we executed a complex, globally orchestrated acquisition and retargeting campaign to seamlessly bring women on the journey, from promotional series trailer to the final episode.

To encourage movement, each piece of content directly connected users with the products and tools they needed to achieve their very own fitness goals.

Beyond the global YouTube activation, local countries had the freedom to add layers to the campaign—from building context for their local girl through the use of local influencers to driving shopping or app-download actions via media innovations.

Our campaign drove over 114 million global views and entertained fans with 95% positive sentiment across a total 45 minutes of in-depth storytelling.

Our weekly retargeting efforts allowed us to continually reach a more engaged and interested audience. As the series progressed, women became more invested in each episode, more than doubling our completion rate from the first to last episode. In the end, we successfully brought over 500k women through the entire series.

Most importantly, the campaign successfully got young women moving, driving 3.5 million new Nike+ Training Club and Nike Running Club app downloads and over 2 million workouts on the Nike+ Training Club app.