Swiss sports drink brand Isostar wanted to modernize its image and forge a more emotional connection with consumers. To do so, we launched the “Life is your playground” rebranding campaign using YouTube Select—a format new to the Swiss market that quickly became an ideal choice.
Refreshing the Isostar sports beverage brand
DEPT® has advised and supported the parent company of Isostar, Wander AG, in its digital marketing for several years. So, our team was ready to get moving when Isostar wanted to majorly refresh its brand.
The “Life is your playground” rebranding campaign aimed to modernize Isostar’s image, making it more appealing to a younger target audience. Additionally, we sought to position Isostar as a drink for not only endurance or competitive athletes, but for multisport and recreational athletes as well. This required the product range to be expanded.
To guarantee a successful outcome for “Life is your playground,” we opted for a broad-based digital campaign that used search, shopping, and display channels, as well as video, in a coordinated manner. We placed a particular focus on the latter with the new YouTube Select format.
The best of YouTube
Launched in 2020, YouTube Select is a content solution on the video platform that combines all previous content solutions (e.g. Google Preferred) under one roof. YouTube Select offers three types of content packages:
- Lineups
- Custom Solutions
- Moments
The lineups cover various topics such as beauty and fashion, entertainment and pop culture, or music. They allow you to display your ads on the currently most popular YouTube channels in the relevant topic area. Custom Solutions are tailored content packages created according to the advertiser’s wishes. Programs are occasional key content verticals that bundle the most popular videos around major music and sporting events.
With these three types of content packages, YouTube guarantees that ads will be displayed on channels and videos that are authentic and relevant to their target audience—a major brand safety benefit. YouTube Select offers advanced brand suitability controls and provides the option to only serve ads on human-verified videos.
YouTube Select is also particularly relevant in light of the demise of third-party cookies. The increasingly limited options for cookie-based targeting are leading to a kind of renaissance of contextual marketing, making YouTube Select even more appealing.
A plan that works
For the campaign creative asset, we used a 30-second mood video showcasing sports such as ice hockey, running, and mountain biking in an emotional way.
Using the YouTube Select Lineup in the sports category, we were matched with fitness bloggers, professional athletes, and sports brands—a portfolio of channels that perfectly matched our campaign objective. The video ad played on channels including Mady Morrison (yoga), DAZN Bundesliga (football), NBA (basketball), and NHL (ice hockey), reaching a wide range of sports enthusiasts in the relevant target audience
In two weeks, the video generated almost 1,200,000 impressions, and the CPM was nearly 30% below the Google benchmark for content lineups.
In collaboration with Google, we also set up a brand lift study and a search lift study for the YouTube Select campaign to measure its success on a qualitative level. The brand life study results showcased that the absolute ad impact on the willingness to buy was +6.23% and the relative ad impact was +21.65%. In the search lift study, we attributed an 877% increase in search queries for the keyword “Isostar” due to the YouTube video ad.
+21.65%
relativ Brand Lift
+877%
relative Search Lift
1.2m
Impressions
A major team win
The successful results of the Isostar YouTube Select campaign gave Wander AG the confidence to use the ad platform for other brands in its family. The Modifast brand campaign, “Shake it off,” saw similarly strong performance with a low CPM—deepening Wander AG’s trust in YouTube Select and the DEPT® team.
Questions?
Senior Digital Marketing Consultant
Luc Suter
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