We partnered with over 60 of the best YouTube Creators to co-produce more than 100 videos and launch the platform’s first shoppable video series—Awesome Stuff Week. For the first time ever, viewers could shop the latest trends, tips and the best products of the season directly from a YouTube video—using the latest in Google’s shopping ad technology to turn YouTube into a shopping network. We launched the series with four weeks timed to key shopping moments. It kicked off with a week on fashion, with creators sharing the latest looks for the fall season (launching right after NY Fashion Week), followed by an online Awesomeness Appraisal show starring our creators and featuring trending products and the ad unit. Then we continued into a full-scale review of all the latest gadgets (after the fall product announcements). And it was all followed by two crazy weeks for Black Friday and the holidays.

We partnered with over 60 YouTube Creators to co-create more than 100 videos that were spread out over multiple Awesome Stuff Weeks. Each week had a different theme that was timed to key shopping moments like fall fashion, product releases and the holidays. Then we further grouped the week of videos into daily categories, arranged by product type. Each week featured approximately 25 videos, which were released during each week day. In addition to taking advantage of the large organic reach of the creators, we supported their videos with a native YouTube media campaign that further drove views and introduced viewers to other Creators who were part of the program. Creators also collaborated in each other’s videos, cross-pollinating their viewer bases. Finally, Creators spread the word to their vast online communities by engaging them on all of their social networks to further amplify the campaign and drive earned views.

The online buzz about Awesome Stuff Week was vast and overwhelmingly positive. The videos garnered over 16.2 million views and over 620,000 hours of watch time. The social campaign achieved over 140 million social impressions and over 8,300 mentions. Social sentiment was 74% positive throughout the campaign, so viewers clearly viewed this partnership as different from your typical brand/influencer matchup. Even more importantly, users loved the shopping feature and bought products off the videos at a much higher rate. CTRs on shopping links were 10 times higher than the benchmarks.