Our secondary communications challenge was to persuade YouTube that it was a good idea to let Wario demolish their treasured page.

We set out to understand YouTube with the same rigor we use to understand our consumers. Why does YouTube only sell placements? What’s important to their bottom line right now?

Our first insight was that YouTube was having trouble monetizing its role in the advertising world. In all the ad campaigns carried out each year, YouTube, the company, barely contributes or profits beyond its role as a video host that sells banners.YouTube needed to be more relevant to advertisers and be seen as a collaborator that deserves a seat at the table when campaign ideas are hatched.So we met with YouTube’s founder and convinced him that Wario smashing up a page would generate PR and send a clear message to advertisers.

The Wario experience has had over 5 million views to date. Kids interacted with it over 21 million times and spent an average of 2.5 minutes in the experience (the video only lasts for 46 seconds!).People were buzzing about Wario all over gaming sites. The experience got covered on far more websites than we could have ever bought media on. And YouTube got phone calls from hundreds of advertisers wanting to follow our lead.

Even more significantly, 18,000 people clicked to buy the game at the conclusion of our experience.