During the IAB Newfronts, digital platforms and publishers show off new programming, formats, and advertising capabilities to advertisers. For the past decade, YouTube's NewFront, Brandcast, has entertained thousands of clients in iconic New York City venues with special guests, presentations, and musical performances to showcase the platform’s content and products.
This year’s NewFronts were a bit different. Due to COVID-19 and the global pandemic, gathering in real life was out of the question. With NewFronts pivoting to digital, YouTube took on the challenge firsthand: how do you reimagine the NewFront experience among a sea of livestreamed keynotes?
On June 25th, we launched YouTube Brandcast Delivered, our 9th annual NewFront presentation and first-ever personalized digital experience for top advertisers, brands, partners, press, and YouTube creators. In a very short amount of time, we created Brandcast Delivered, an experience that brought the magic of YouTube to life through a dynamic interactive registration, physical packages shipped to guests, and customized content tailored to individual business needs.
In pivoting YouTube Brandcast to a digital activation, the team leaned heavily on YouTube’s narrative—Primetime is Personal—and developed a personalized NewFront delivered to you and made just for you. More than a cool experience, Brandcast Delivered was our chance to truly embody what makes YouTube unique and real for people.
Each invitees’ personalized Brandcast Delivered was packed with the latest YouTube trends, tools and insights to help them win this season, and was streamed straight to their living room TV’s served with a DIY pizza kit on the side.
Throughout the completely reimagined virtual event, we celebrated the breadth of YouTube’s voices and content. Featuring appearances from creators like Patrick Starrr, Emma Chamberlain, Questlove, and Alex Rodriguez, we constructed a “personal primetime” for each attendee based on their passions and shared how YouTube’s deep connection to people’s lives means better results no matter a marketer’s goal – from reach and awareness to action.
We took our show, which is traditionally 90 minutes, and flipped it on its head. Instead of one spectacular show witnessed by thousands of people, we created something personal; thousands of completely custom 20-minute shows with custom graphics, soundtracks, and content, each to an audience of one. To achieve this, we had to push the limits of technology and creativity. Each show had to be rendered, quality checked, and then uploaded to a personalized website for them to access on show day.
The magic of Brandcast Delivered started with the registration process. Through an interactive website, guests were instructed to create their own unique show. This informed the customization of the content, tailoring every Brandcast to each client’s selections. They had the option to choose from one of five YouTube trends: comedy & entertainment, food & recipes, learning & education, lifestyle & fashion, and sports -- as well as the YouTube talent of their choice - Gordon Ramsay, Josh Gad, Lilly Singh, or Rosanna Pansino -- to deliver their Brandcast to them.
We also took into consideration the environment in which people would be consuming Brandcast Delivered, in their homes and most likely with their families. We sent out physical kits to all guests. Inside was a pizza kit (with–you guessed it–custom ingredients) and a series of context-creating objects like socks, popcorn, a Google chromecast and gifts from your chosen YouTube creator.
Each user’s gifting experience was completely and unexpectedly personalized, just like the pizza kit that was delivered before the show. The gifts were determined by the user’s content choices during registration and tied back to the show itself. Each gifting opportunity was ultimately decided upon by the user, without them knowing their content choices during registration informed what would be delivered in their gift box.
Unlike most branded gifting experiences, where every participant receives the same items, Brandcast Delivered focused on making the gifting options just as personal, custom, and unique as the show itself. In total, there were 209,952 different possible combinations of the fully customized Brandcast Delivered kits.
During a time where events were shifting to digital and people were stuck in front of their computers on endless video calls, we created a pizza night on the couch for everyone to enjoy, just like YouTube.
The intended goal of Brandcast Delivered was to bring awareness to the value of YouTube for advertisers and highlight the deep connection between YouTube and the billions of people who consume content on the platform every month and how that correlates to better marketing results for any advertiser.
Brandcast Delivered was a huge success, engaging 40% more clients YOY and was ranked as the #1 Most Impactful NewFront and Upfront overall, according to the Independent Advertiser Perceptions Upfront and NewFront Impact Report.
Online, Brandcast Delivered generated over 1.2M+ social impressions, 1.6K+ press mentions, and tens of thousands of video views, leaving a lasting digital footprint.
