YouTube encouraged the circulation of love notes between its platform's creators and their fans.
Objective:
Every year around Valentine's Day, YouTube celebrates the bonds between creators and their fans. The platform built the #LoveNotes campaign as an opportunity to spotlight genuine creator/fan love by sharing feel-good comments from real fans.
In 2021, YouTube flipped the script and increased the global reach of the campaign by encouraging creators to share their love for their communities, inspiring fans to return the gesture. Beyond that, driving YouTube Shorts engagement was top of mind along with improving the perception for existing and new creators that YouTube is fun and aspirational and celebrates the creator ecosystem.
Target Audience:
The primary audience was 3.8 million targeted YouTube creators and their fan bases worldwide.
Creative Strategy:
YouTube brought #LoveNotes to life by designing dynamic digital out-of-home (DOOH) placements seen from the streets of New York City, Los Angeles, and London. In order to create an integrated, scalable experience across all touchpoints, the platform put together a creative toolkit for YouTube's cross-functional teams to promote #LoveNotes via social media, blog posts, and video channels for the duration of the campaign.
Context:
Since its inception in 2018, the annual #LoveNotes campaign has expanded its reach to more prominent features of the platform including a YouTube masthead, the official YouTube blog, and various scaled communications — and the 2021 campaign had more of a global footprint with a DOOH execution in London in addition to New York and Los Angeles.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Creators amplified their #LoveNotes across their social channels and there was notable use of Instagram posts and Stories to achieve this amplification. The effort generated an estimated 24.3 million social media impressions (a 31 percent increase year-over-year) and achieved YouTube's highest monthly social engagement rate in two years.
DOOH placements were scaled up in this year's campaign to feature placements in London, Los Angeles, and New York, with the billboards running from February 12th to the 15th. These placements featured comments from fans to their favorite creators. The effort generated an estimated 100,000 impressions across the three placements, amplified by nine featured creators promoting on their social channels, achieving an estimated reach of 800,000 and prompting over 2,500 mentions.
Neither creators nor the platform could succeed without fans. YouTube sees #LoveNotes as an opportunity to further connect the two, increase positive sentiment and appreciation, and ultimately educate and drive engagement with the community.
The #LoveNotes campaign resulted in 90 percent overall positive sentiment (up 1 percent from 2020) and 96 percent positive sentiment among creators (up 6 percent from 2020).
Sharing fans' gushing comments in such highly visible placements had viewers tuning in for #LoveNotes on various YouTube channels and platforms. Much of this content was then reposted by top creators around the world, encouraging fans to continue sending love and positive vibes to their favorite creators.
