Leontien Boere looks after digital and content marketing for Dutch heritage brand HEMA. She has nearly a decade’s experience working in digital marketing for retailers and brands across the Netherlands.
At HEMA, we’ve always been about quality and affordability. Since 1926, we’ve been a beloved part of Dutch culture. But like many established brands, we faced a challenge: how can we stay true to our heritage while connecting with new, younger audiences?
We could see that traditional TV viewership was changing — it is increasingly skewing older. Younger audiences, particularly Gen Z, are moving to the more curated world of online video. YouTube, with its diverse content and easy accessibility, has become the go-to destination for this demographic.
Recognising this shift, we started exploring how we could connect with a younger demographic without losing what makes HEMA, HEMA.
HEMA has a unique place in the hearts of Dutch consumers. We've been part of their lives for almost a century, creating memories and shared experiences. Engaging communication has played a crucial role in this success. HEMA demonstrates that a retailer can still thrive in competition with global giants that have far greater scale and capital. To achieve this, you must get under the skin of your target audience, dare to do things differently, choose a sharp strategy, execute it consistently, and bring it to life through communication.
HEMA's digital marketing makeover
We knew we needed to by extending our reach beyond TV, but we wanted to go beyond simply repurposing TV ads for other platforms. We needed to turn our digital marketing strategy on its head and modernise it to keep up with today’s fast-paced retail environment. Amplifying our message in a new way — without compromising our brand essence.
So, we didn't just throw our ads onto YouTube and hope for the best.
Data is central to everything we do at HEMA. To make sure we were comparing apples to apples, we did not look at CPM metrics (cost per thousand impressions) as per our usual digital marketing measurements. Instead we looked at the cross-media reporting tool also known as XMR data. XMR data provides us with cross platform measurement to easily see the efficiency and reach of our YouTube and TV campaigns in one report. Without it we would not have been able to measure the incremental reach we gained through our new strategy.
By narrowing our target viewership from 25-54 year olds to 25-44 year olds, we saw a significant increase in reach without spending any extra money.
Constantly analysing how our YouTube campaigns performed against our TV benchmarks, allowed us to fine-tune our strategy in real-time.
For instance, our first experiment was with an existing TV commercial that we turned into a YouTube video:
Learning quickly that you need different formats, we created shorter versions of the ad specifically designed for YouTube's skippable ad formats. The creative team also experimented with different calls-to-action, tailored to the platform's unique engagement metrics.
With each iteration we found new ways to create content tailored to the audience on YouTube to help us better connect with them.
By adding YouTube to our channel mix we have extended the reach of our TV commercials. By tweaking not only the sizes and length, but also using the “targeting and optimisations” option in Google Ads, we extended this additional reach even further and mostly in our target audience.
Once all of that was in place we used YouTube's audience tools to reach specific age groups and interests. For instance, by narrowing our target viewership from 25-54 year olds to 25-44 year olds, we saw a significant increase in reach without spending any extra money.
That’s because the online video platform is especially effective at reaching these age groups and those who watch less linear TV, as you can see from our analysis:

Reach for the sky: HEMA gains with YouTube
After the first few months of this new strategy for online video, we’ve already seen some great successes. We’re a really well-known brand, but even so we noticed a 7% increase in reach for our ads, and at a 80% less cost per view compared to TV. Reach, for us, refers to the total number of unique individuals exposed to a marketing campaign.

We also saw an increase in Search for items shown in our YouTube ads, for instance Takkie, the stuffed dog that comes to life in the examples above. Our analysis showed that people who saw the YouTube video actually searched more for that stuffed toy.
Our results proved that our new tactics were opening up a cost-efficient way to tell our brand story to a bigger audience.
Beyond the screen: HEMA's multi-platform future
Obviously this is just the start, there's so much more we can do — from using AI tools and integrating content feeds to personalise the user experience even further. We’re moving towards a “big screen strategy” where we want to reach people via all the streaming platforms that we have in the Netherlands.
Our experience has shown us the importance of being open to new ideas and technologies. By embracing change while staying true to our core values, HEMA has been able to reconnect to a whole new generation.