“The McCain Golden Oven” campaign managed to breakthrough with the most ad resistant and elusive of audiences, Gen Z. In addition, we compelled them to engage with a brand they had never bought before. And we were able to do all of this through one of their most hated ad formats – YouTube pre-roll videos.

This campaign disrupted the pre-roll ad format. We created a ground-breaking way to be culturally relevant to our target. The implementation was so unique that even Google took notice, complimenting us on how the campaign showed them how to innovate on their own platform.

McCain is Canada’s leading brand of fries. However, their top spot is under threat due to sluggish growth and losing share to their biggest competitor. To drive sales, McCain needed to do something they have never done before – connect with Gen Z and recruit them into the category.

From the outset, this seemed like an uphill battle for the brand. Gen Z has the lowest attention span of any target demographic, they are infamous for skipping ads, and they haven’t bought McCain (or any other) frozen fries before.

Our challenge was to engage this elusive audience.

The insight for the campaign was inspired by our universal love for fries. Everyone loves fries. They are always an undeniable hit. So much so that they make any meal, or any moment, better. This insight is what fueled our creative platform – That’s Golden.

In our research, we found that Gen Z are extremely ad averse - 82% skip ads as fast as possible and nearly 70% physically distract themselves while an ad is playing. Even if they were to watch an ad, only 32% trust the ads targeted to their news feeds.

Despite their ad resistance, we realized that there might still be a way to engage them. Gen Z are one of the biggest video watchers. They grew up with YouTube and access to endless video content. So, it is not surprising that 70% of Gen Z watch more than three hours of mobile video a day.

Gen Z has been dubbed as the most creative generation yet. They want brands to speak with them, not at them. So, our approach was to earn their attention through disruption to compel them to engage with us by meeting them where they are.

We decided to engage Gen Z with videos on their favourite video viewing platform, YouTube. We created video ads that completely flipped the script on Gen Z’s most hated ad format – YouTube pre-roll ads.

Introducing “The McCain Golden Oven”, the first ever campaign where you can win simply by watching an ad! Our YouTube-first campaign took something Gen Z hate to watch – pre-roll ads – and turned them into pre-roll lottery tickets.

“The McCain Golden Oven” pre-roll videos came in different lengths ranging from two2 to 10 minutes. The contest rewarded viewers who were willing to stick around long enough for the fries to be ready. And, to make sure we reached them at the right place and the right time, the pre-roll ads were served on videos that were rooted in top Gen Z interests.

Now, if a viewer were lucky enough to be served a winning ad and the “McCain Golden Oven” ding-ed, viewers could win the golden thing inside, which could be a plate of golden fries, a golden hoverboard, a Golden Retriever statue, or maybe gold-trimmed headphones!

The golden gifts were designed to match Gen Z sensibilities – effective in making someone with a ridiculously low attention span wait for almost 10 minutes to get the reward!

For starters, the campaign was highly successful in reaching this hard-to-reach audience, reaching 77% of the Gen Z target.

While Gen Z is known to skip ads at the first chance they get, this campaign got over 14 million views and 50 million campaign impressions. The contest resulted in over 2,000 Golden prizes being won – more than quadruple the amount we originally planned.

The videos were so effective that while the Gen Z attention span is only eight seconds, we were able to hold it for 64 seconds, an exponential increase of 700%. And while YouTube’s Engagement benchmark is 20% completion for :30 ads, our two, five, and 10-minute videos had a 25% completion rate, for an increase of 25%. Finally, the audience not only watched the sizzling fries in the Golden Oven, but they also generated over 953,000 engagements.