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.

We learned a lot about the foodie and footie audiences in our audience exploration and used this to develop insights that directly drove creative and targeting decisions.

For example:

We knew that cooking for others strongly over-indexed on weekends so we upweighted Sorted Food recipe tutorial ads on the weekends.

Both our audiences were consuming over 50% of their video on mobile, so we made mobile-specific creative that we only showed on mobile.

It turned out football fans were 65% more likely to be into gaming, so we made gaming-specific ads that we only showed in front of gaming videos.

We used internal YouTube data to reveal that a high percentage of people likely to be interested in Sorted Food were subscribed to One Direction on YouTube, so we made a custom Sorted Food parody One Direction song just for them! That played not only on YouTube but also in One Direction concerts across the UK.

These are just some of the examples, we could go on and on! Overall, we ended up with 40+ different TrueView video creatives, all specifically designed to be as personalised and contextual as possible based on our thorough data-driven investigation of the target audiences.

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.

For our 2015 UK YouTube Creator campaign, we used countless data-driven audience insights to enhance the relevancy and personalisation of our ads, dramatically improving our video creative and its performance.

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.

YouTube is home to some of the world’s biggest stars yet there are still so many great YouTube creators that are not well known. This means that people can underestimate the quality of content on YouTube because they don’t know about our biggest and best.

So in 2015 we set out to change that by popularising two of our best and most high quality creators, Sorted Food and Copa90.

The objective of the campaign was to increase Sorted Food & Copa90 awareness amongst 18-34 UK consumers.