It’s no secret that digital media targeting has become incredibly advanced over the last few years and advertisers are adjusting to take full advantage of this. We took this challenge head on and aimed to produce a data-led video creative programme, deeply founded in consumer insight, that could take full advantage of YouTube’s advanced targeting mechanisms, which were rich ground for innovation with video.

Knowing that football fans and foodies were most likely to be interested in our creators (Sorted Food & Copa90) we took a look at the food and football target audiences more broadly to learn about who they were and what they cared about. We used this to inform and very closely guide the video creative strategy for the campaign. A normal YouTube video campaign will be comprised of 3 - 5 videos. We created 40+ so that we could cater our video creative to the audience in a way that’s never been done before.

Once we aligned on our foodie and footie target audiences, we used rich internal YouTube datasets, TGI consumer data, and 27 (yes 27!) custom online surveys to learn more about them. For example, we learned that foodie audiences were 72% more likely to enjoy fashion content, which thusly informed our creative and targeting for the campaign.

Overall, we combined all the data to build a framework of rich insights that drove our video creative and programmatic video targeting. Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, giving us more viewing, less skipping and greater awareness uplifts.

Daily Optimisation:

We accompanied our 40 plus TrueView creatives with a thorough Brandlift testing plan to allow for daily optimisations. Examples of specific results from this:

Adding a mobile specific intro to our ads led to 17% higher awareness uplift (when compared to ads without a mobile specific intro that were otherwise identical).

Similarly, adding a content specific intro (e.g. fashion) led to 25% higher uplifts in awareness.

Retargeting users with short retargeting ads led to 40% more cost-efficient uplifts in awareness when compared to showing users the same 30” hero ad again.

Overall results:

Our TrueView ads were amongst the most successful TrueView ads EVER across the world. They were in the top 1% in terms of awareness uplift for over 1 million TrueView ads that have ever been tested, easily making up for the extra cost involved in creating them.

This greatly contributed to the campaign’s overall achievement of a 66% uplift in UK 18-34 year old awareness for both YouTube creators.