PURPOSE
With a ban on 59 apps, the short video app category in India was left vacant, creating an opportunity for YouTube Shorts to fill this gap. Our launch campaign aims to provide short video creators a new home on YouTube, supporting their need to publish content, express creativity, and reach a wide audience. This initiative aligns with YouTube’s goal of helping people easily find, watch, and interact with meaningful videos, ensuring we do the right thing by creators during this transition.
With a ban on 59 apps, the short video app category in India was left vacant, creating an opportunity for YouTube Shorts to fill this gap. Our launch campaign aims to provide short video creators a new home on YouTube, supporting their need to publish content, express creativity, and reach a wide audience. This initiative aligns with YouTube’s goal of helping people easily find, watch, and interact with meaningful videos, ensuring we do the right thing by creators during this transition.
I worked as a Creative Group Head at Toaster Ltd. with a production house, copywriters and designers partnering with the product marketing managers at YouTube India to create an awareness campaign highlighting product features and micro details targeted towards potential users.
USER INTERFACE
TARGET AUDIENCE
The primary target audience is short-form creators displaced by the app ban. The secondary target audience is heavy YouTube users who may be interested in becoming creators but haven't found the right platform yet.
INSIGHTS
In the early stages, creators are excited by the ease of creating short videos, the potential for discovery, and the opportunity to gain appreciation through likes, shares, and subscribers.
Once they achieve scale, they are drawn to opportunities for monetizing their popularity.
We leveraged YouTube being the largest video platform in the world and that creators can go BIG, by going with a SHORTS creation. The combination of in app creation of a short form video for the first time, coupled with the potential to garner audience on a platform like YouTube made for a compelling narrative for the product launch.
Go Big. Go Short!
The launch film landed this message through a heavily product UI driven creative, thus differentiating YouTube Shorts from the YouTube app.
VIDEO SHOOT
The videos were shot by a small numbered crew of the production house that involved the team at Toaster only remotely, basically through a Whatsapp video call, since we continued to work from home.
The creative team gave inputs to the production house and actions were coordinated systematically. The film needed approx. 18 short videos to be shot and this shoot covered them in two days.
The film was designed into vertical, horizontal and square frames to allow for various platforms and devices. Additionally, the 30 seconder was cut to 15s and 6s edits as well. Shown here is only the square (neutral) frame of the 30s film. Kindly refer to the uploaded videos titled as these in the portfolio section.
DIGITAL COMMUNICATION
Alongside the hero film, we also promoted a digital banner campaign inviting creators to understand the product better through a master class sign up. The workshop was promoted on the Google Display Network in the same duration as the product awareness film was being promoted pan India in multiple languages. This helped us reach out to creators from different regions and creative communities in the country.
IMPACT & CONCLUSION
The launch campaign landed the message - "Go Big, Go Short!" through a heavily product UI driven creative, thus differentiating YouTube Shorts from parent brand, YouTube. The launch campaign was trailed by multiple call-to-action driven YouTube preroll ads, inviting potential users to make their first YouTube Short and participate in trends on Holi and Covid19 Vaccination day. Since the launch in December 2020, YouTube Shorts had surpassed 15 billion daily views globally, growing 131% by the quarter.
THANK YOU
