Each season the Queen RuVeal, or cast announcement, is a unique opportunity for the RuPaul’s Drag Race Social & Digital teams to lean into the latest social technology to announce the group of Queens competing for the crown. All Stars 5 was no different however the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shutdown posed a significant hurdle to create a social event building off record-breaking performance metrics season-over-season. Pivoting the campaign while maintaining its exclusivity and impact with fans was essential. What resulted was a custom YouTube Premiere launch and one of the most successful RuVeal campaigns to date!
In an effort to grow subscribers for the newly launched RuPaul’s Drag Race YouTube channel (live 4/14/20), the highly anticipated All Stars 5 Queen RuVeal proved the perfect campaign to build fan excitement while attracting new subs. To achieve this the team “remixed” a Drag Race premiere episode staple— the Queen Werkroom Entrances —to create a custom longform video asset. The video was streamed as an exclusive YouTube Premiere with ancillary assets to follow, posted across show platforms.
The RuVeal shattered series records with peak concurrent streams hitting 132.7K — the highest total ever (+288.9% vs AS4, +248% vs S12). In just the first day total RuVeal video views hit 966k (+169% vs AS4) across platforms. To date the video has over 3.6M total views. YouTube subscribers were also up to 91.8K total due to the RuVeal (+46% from the day prior) and now total over 360K.
