YouTube was growing exponentially, but growth was pulling them into different directions. Some were pushing for YouTube to be more like TV, with high-quality programming and production values.
Others wanted to double down on its unique ecosystem of fans and creators — but advertisers did not see the value.
We needed to develop a unifying vision for the world’s largest library of random awesomeness that gave focus and direction.
A look at the emerging media landscape and deep immersion in the world of creators and fans and their relationship to YouTube revealed the answer: YouTube is much more than just another ‘tube’, or another media channel. Its power has always been in the “You”. YouTube is propelled by the passion of its creators and fans — a cohort we called Generation C: curatorial, community-oriented, and creative.
This allowed us to create a blueprint for how to deploy YouTube’s creator and fan community to accelerate audience growth and increase advertising revenue.
We designed YouTube’s global creative platform around “You” – “You” the Creators and “You” the fans. We made the creators the face of YouTube. The platform showed the power of YouTube both as a global media platform and as a global community.
Tone of voice: We developed a set of engaging guidelines that helped YouTube and its creators communicate more authentically with its fans and each other.
Creative campaigns: We developed a multi-media, multi-category, global creative platform that gave YouTube’s top creators their own campaigns.
Sub-brand architectures and launch campaigns: We built YouTube’s brand architecture and aligned internal teams around the new vision by translating the Quest across verticals.
We helped launch the YouTube Gaming brand with launch assets that broke down the walls between gaming fans, curators, makers, and brands. This empowered gamers to discover more relevant content and collaborate in new ways that would contribute to the video game platform of the future. In the first six months, YouTube Gaming had over one million mobile activations with approximately 70K daily active viewers.
We helped YouTube launch their music app with their largest marketing push of 2015. We created an Anthem film, three teaser TrueViews, product videos, and an App Store demo video. Three weeks after the app launched in late 2015 there were over 1.5M downloads. The launch film gained 5M views and the stations have had over 10.6M through 2016.
The “YouLine” for Dude Perfect was “You make every day gameday.” So we thought, “why not actually improve a place where real kids play?” We called New York City officials and discovered that Tompkins Square Park was in dire need of repair. Then, alongside the kickoff of the campaign, we turned the court into a trick shot playground.
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