Google / YouTube’s Awesome Stuff Week

Turning YouTube Into a Shopping Network Before Anyone Else Thought To.

YouTube has become the place people go to research products. Unboxing videos alone were pulling 1.1 billion views a year. But there was a gap: you could watch someone review a product, fall in love with it, and then have to leave YouTube entirely to go buy it. The team saw that as an opportunity to fundamentally change how people shop online by pairing a new shoppable ad technology from Google with the creators' audiences already trusted.

The result was Awesome Stuff Week, a series of themed five-day events on YouTube featuring over 60 top creators talking about their favorite stuff across fashion, gadgets, and holiday gifts. Viewers could now purchase products directly from YouTube videos for the first time, using Google's new TrueView for Shopping ads. To launch it, the team created a fake appraisal show called "How Awesome Is This?" featuring famous YouTubers bringing gadgets and fashion to an "Awesomeness Appraiser." The videos doubled as a clever showcase for the new ad unit without ever mentioning it directly. Customized end tags were built for each themed week, with logos made from real products. The campaign ran across four months timed to the biggest shopping spikes of the year: Fashion Week, Black Friday, and the holidays.

Impact: 16.2M views. 140M+ social impressions. 100+ videos. 8,000+ online mentions, 74% positive, 0% negative. Webby People's Voice Award for Best Native Advertising. Covered by Digiday, Social Media Today, and Tubefilter. The campaign set a new precedent for shoppable video, and the TrueView for Shopping format it helped launch went on to grow 260%+ in active advertisers within its first few years. 64% of shoppers now say YouTube influences their purchase decisions.

Role: Creative Direction, Art Direction