Every year, the YouTube Works Awards celebrate the most creative and impactful campaigns on YouTube. These are the ads that really make the most of the platform through their use of insights to create videos that are fresh and resonant — videos that can only exist on YouTube. The campaigns successfully achieve outsized results by leaning into what makes YouTube unique, like its diverse creator ecosystem, its ability to foster community engagement, and its seamless integration into today’s cultural zeitgeist.
To choose this year’s winners, we partnered with experts in creativity and advertising effectiveness at Kantar and Contagious. With their support, we assembled an accomplished panel of judges composed of senior leaders from brands, creative shops, and media agencies. We then put campaigns through a rigorous evaluation process to find the most unique and effective examples of creative excellence on YouTube.
The winning campaigns — and the video strategies behind the work — will inspire marketers to be bolder and reach new creative heights. Here are three lessons we learned from them.
Build for a passionate audience
Brands know that YouTube is where they can foster both niche and mass communities, cultivate audience passions, and spark fandom. Indeed, many of the winning campaigns spoke directly to viewers’ interests and hobbies, transforming them into fans who actively sought out the brand’s content.
L.L.Bean, for example, had the goal of building a community of outdoor enthusiasts. The marketing team used various Google tools, such as Google Trends, to get into the mindset of their target audience and dive deep into their interests. The result was a how-to video series that answered people’s frequently asked questions about the great outdoors, such as the right way to start a campfire and techniques for getting into a kayak.
By putting the series on YouTube, where its audience actively searches for and discovers content about the outdoors, L.L.Bean struck gold with viewers. From the campaign’s launch in June 2022 through the end of July 2024, brand channel subscriptions grew by 592%, empowering L.L.Bean to cultivate a lasting community and foster ongoing engagement on YouTube. In addition, the brand generated significant attributed ROI for its business through in-feed video ads.
Nissan North America also set out to leverage a passion point and embed itself in today’s cultural trends while introducing the all-electric vehicle Ariya. During its audience research, Nissan discovered that people who enjoyed lo-fi music were more likely to be interested in electric vehicles. This insight directly inspired the brand to tap into YouTube’s vibrant lo-fi fandom with a bold approach: launching a four-hour lo-fi music video that evoked the average charging time for an electric vehicle.
The campaign quickly became a hit, driving an electrifying 1,083% surge in searches for the Nissan Ariya and creating a legion of enthusiastic fans. With its innovative approach, Nissan not only boosted its relevance among lo-fi fandom, but authentically embedded itself in, and engaged with, this community on a deeper level.
Dare to disrupt
To truly stand out today, marketers must adopt an experimental mindset that mirrors the way YouTube creators continuously evolve their content. It’s essential to embrace the platform as a creative canvas where campaigns can break out of traditional approaches and spark engagement in novel ways.
U.S. agencies Wavemaker and VML opted for creative disruption when their client, America’s Navy, faced declining sign-ups among Gen Z. The agencies decided to move away from traditional recruitment tactics and work with popular YouTube creators Darryl Mayes and Xiaoma, who — as a dog handler and linguist, respectively — had skills that were necessary for specific Navy jobs.
Together, they built a long-form video series called Sailor VS to showcase different Navy careers and humanize the military experience. One video, for example, had Darryl challenging a military working dog and its handler to find hidden items in a house, while in another Xiaoma explored what it’s like to be a Navy cryptologist technician. By leveraging the creators’ diverse talents and authentic voices, the campaign succeeded in breaking through to Gen Z, driving a remarkable 48% increase in searches for Navy sign-ups.
Disruption also helped Claritin stand out and build brand equity in a crowded market segment. Rather than spouting the usual claims and competitive comparisons in its ads, Claritin had its audience rally around an important cause: Since male trees are the primary producers of pollen, the brand promoted planting more female trees. Claritin dubbed the campaign the DiversiTree Project and — knowing how popular YouTube is with millennials and Gen Zers — leaned into the platform to amplify its message.
The “DiversiTree Project” successfully resonated with allergy sufferers seeking a proactive solution and demonstrated Claritin’s commitment to the well-being of future generations. The campaign generated a 5.77% lift in awareness of the environmental initiative among viewers 18 to 24 years old, and drove a 255% search lift for Claritin. In fact, “DiversiTree Project” was so successful that Claritin’s parent company, Bayer, strategically evolved the campaign this year to optimize it for even more generational segments.
Get immersive with diverse formats and music
Many of the winning brands embraced YouTube’s captivating, sound-on environment to elevate their campaigns through music. They also used the platform’s diverse video formats to suit different audience needs and viewing contexts.
A great example of this approach is Booking.com’s music-driven campaign featuring Melissa McCarthy, which took viewers on a whimsical journey through vacation rentals and hotels. To ensure its message reached online travel bookers at every stage of their decision-making process and met them in all the ways they consume content, the brand used a variety of assets across 30-second spots, 6-second clips, skippable and non-skippable ad formats, and YouTube Shorts. This resulted in a campaign that delivered impressive results, reaching 108 million viewers leading up to the Super Bowl and driving significant increases in all postgame brand-health KPIs.
Nissan North America also strategically used diverse formats for its Ariya lo-fi music campaign. It invited viewers to engage with its full-length video by deploying a six-minute cutdown version. Viewers who then went on to watch the four-hour video were treated to calming background music that they could enjoy during daily activities. This successfully linked relaxing lo-fi music and the Ariya in people’s minds, generating over 7.6% lift in Ariya awareness to make Nissan top of mind for an all-electric SUV.
Similarly, VML and Wavemaker ensured the “Sailor VS” campaign for America’s Navy and its invigorating soundtrack effectively reached viewers regardless of how they liked to consume video content. The campaign included concise bumper ads and Shorts, such as the series’ trailer, which drove eager viewers to explore more content. The skippable long-form episodes ran anywhere from seven to 12 minutes and delivered completion rates nearly 3X over long-form benchmarks.
This year’s winning YouTube Works Awards campaigns all display a willingness to experiment, innovate, and capitalize on everything YouTube has to offer. They not only impressed the judges, but turned viewers into fans and set a new standard for YouTube ad campaigns. How will these creative campaigns inspire marketers in the future? We can’t wait to find out next year.
