Develop a YouTube series that announces Bretman Rock as Klarna's global ambassador and grow Klarna’s subscriber base on YouTube. Additionally, the series should strive for high average watch time, view through rate, and overall views to hit company reach and engagement KPIs. This series should also continue to drive product awareness, education, and consideration of Klarna and Klarna's products. The hero assets should also be adapted to serve our owned channels and earned channels.
Through development we landed on the following story: When Klarna’s original music group is unable to fulfill their task of writing a company jingle, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski asks Global Ambassador Bretman Rock to step in and take over the job. The catch? He only has 48 hours to write new lyrics and perform the jingle. He travels to Klarna Headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden for songwriting inspiration. When the tasks seems insurmountable, he enlists the help of his friend Felix Sandman to finish the job. Felix shares songwriting tips at the legendary Baggpipe studios and teaches Bretman about the Swedish fika. The series culminates in an unforgettable live performance from Bretman and Felix.
The big question was "how do we balance product education and entertainment?" – ensuring that we don't dilute the big character Bretman is while also ensuring Klarna's role is still at the fore. Since launching in the US, Klarna’s marketing has always been rooted in our Swedish culture. We pride ourselves in spotlighting our quirks. Leaning into this and coupling it with Bretman’s quirk of random bursts of song, we landed on giving Bretman the task of writing a branded jingle. In this way, we would also be able to tap into the shift in sound-on social consumption across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. As this would be Bretman’s first time in Stockholm, and in having had an existing relationship with him, we knew his reactions would supply the entertaining moments to keep viewers engaged over time. To drive product education, we took a “show, don’t tell” approach and developed editorial content supplementing the series on other Klarna owned channels. This included long-form editorial interviews, shop-the-look curated collections, and Stockholm city guides all in the Klarna App across 4 markets– US, UK, DE, and SE.
We traveled to Stockholm to shoot our 3 part series in just 2.5 days. Our 15 person crew was able to shoot 15 pages of content across famous landmarks such as Stortorget Square. Shooting in such a public location presents a myriad of challenges, but the chaos translated well to our final edit.
We accelerated our post production schedule to just one month from wrap to publication. The team worked across 4 different time zones to meet our challenging deadlines. This includes bespoke Motion Design, Color, and a detailed Sound Mix.
While YouTube was an obvious priority, the team also developed ~30 bespoke social assets across Instagram and TikTok to support the series. Additionally, Meta Ads were created to drive traffic to both our Klarna App and the hero videos on YouTube.
The final hero deliverables on YouTube featured SEO optimized headlines and descriptions along with eyecatching thumbnails featuring our stars, Bretman Rock and Felix Sandman.
Having started this project with a YouTube presence solely dependent on repurposed ATL campaign assets, this series generated a +15% growth in subscribers. And adhering to platform best practices to grow subscribership, we prioritized view-through rate (VTR) and average watch time (AWT)-- 68% and 3 mins respectively. Huge wins for the team, considering each episode was roughly 5 minutes. The YouTube series amassed 6M total Impressions and 3.9M total views (the latter which is equivalent to 203K hours or 23 years of watching!).
Our social breakouts earned high engagement on TikTok and +14K followers on Instagram. The series contributed to a 150% increase in TikTok followership year over year.
Our owned channel efforts resulted in 4M emails sent across the 4 markets, with order conversion rates exceeding benchmarks at 2.3%, generating 57.5K orders. Additionally, the series was adapted for release to Klarna's Social Shopping feature, which resulted in 100% above benchmark results in average views, watch duration, product card clicks, video likes, and product saves. Our Meta video ad numbers were also excellent, amassing 4x the benchmark for play time and triple the industry standard CTR of 1% at 3.70% and then 6.44% for Unique CTR.
We were not only able to share an entertaining series to grow our YouTube audience but we’re able to show our global footprint and introduce our global ambassador to new audiences through direct business conversions.
