Dive Brief:
- Macy’s partnered with Google for the Summer Vibes campaign, an online music festival that featured YouTube influencers and included TrueView Discovery video ads and Shoppable Cards.
- The effort resulted in more than 4 million views of the festival and related videos on YouTube, a 60% increase in festival product consideration and a 15% lift in searches for Macy’s on Google and YouTube in the month following the festival.
- A key goal of the campaign was to reach millennials and turn them into Macy’s customers, something that was ostensibly a success given the considerable brand lift afterward.
Dive Insight:
The campaign by Macy’s offers marketers a few key takeways: For one, Macy's and Google chose a non-traditional idea directly appealing to the demo they were trying to reach, creating an original music festival from the ground up with millennial-skewing artists and social influencers.
The second takeaway is that after picking a platform to facilitate the festival – YouTube – Macy's tapped two distinct ad units that were particularly well-suited to the video platform, TrueView Discovery and Shoppable Cards. Those formats ultimately helped convert viewers into customers in real time, and at a key period of the year — back to school shopping season.
The campaign underscores the need for marketers to experiment with new strategies for engaging younger consumers, whose content consumption habits are vastly different from older consumers.
"Engaging millennials to shop at Macy's is an important focus for us," said Serena Potter, Macy's Group vice president of digital media strategy, in a Google post. "As they head to college and set up dorm rooms, then get that first internship or job out of college, we want to be their store of choice."
Potter added that once viewers were visiting the online music festival, the Shoppable Cards ad format was essential, since it allowed viewers to click and buy products from within the video they were watching.