The Drum Awards for Digital Industries: who’s in frame for Most Effective Use of Video?

For one of the most competitive categories, Most Effective Use of Video, our stellar panel of judges were looking at entrants’ use of innovation, production quality, storytelling and everything else that makes the medium so powerful.

Below, we look at all of the nominated work. And don’t forget, the awards ceremony takes place during our week-long awards festival, which runs from December 5-9.

Karmarama for National Citizen Service (NCS)

Following a global pandemic and two years of canceled summer programs, the British not-for-profit organization National Citizen Service (NCS) felt it had lost relevance with young people.

Karmarama (part of Accenture Song) set out to drive interest in NCS’s summer program with a disconnected, anxious, frustrated generation by helping them confidently explore their independence. While young people are vocal on social media, often leading the conversation, the understanding is that they feel unheard and want to be a part of shaping a future that will impact them most.

NCS decided to hand over control and give its audience the platform to use their voice, not only reach each other but to also reach their parents, guardians and the adult world.

NCS presents: Mixtape ‘22 was an audio/visual EP with three rising musicians creating new songs that embody the lived experiences of British teens. In the first three months of launch, interest in the summer program had exceeded targets by 379%, brand love was up 18% and MixTape ‘22 had over 3m content views.

Lemonlight for Yogibo

Furniture brand Yogibo teamed up with video production company Lemonlight and actress Drew Barrymore for an ad campaign showing how its products are perfect for an exhausted mother after a long, busy day.

Lemonlight worked to boost Yogibo’s sales, reach new customers and expand the customer base in a thoughtful yet lighthearted video.

The Lemonlight team strategized on-set production, cinematography and scriptwriting to align all details with the Yogibo brand and mission while honoring Barrymore’s quirky demeanor. For the ad itself, the crew followed a very busy Barrymore through her film sets until she fell into her Yogibo at the end of the day, illustrating the comfort of the brand’s products.

The video ran on social media, cable and OTT streaming and brought in around $500,000 in direct sales. It received an average CTR of 3.75% and exceeded 2m views across channels.

M&C Saatchi Indonesia for Manan Shah

With 270 million monthly active users and 500m app downloads globally, Sweden-based Truecaller was on a mission to build trust everywhere by making communication safe and efficient. After a successful listing in Nasdaq Stockholm in October 2021, the company announced its plans to expand its footprint in Indonesia.

The campaign leveraged famous Indonesian celebrities Yayan Ruhian, Dinda Kanya Dewi and Billy Boedjanger, who each played the role of a deceitful wolf camouflaged as an innocent sheep. The three celebrities are well-known in the market and have extensive experience in acting, especially in antagonist roles.

The impact on the brand was instantaneous. Truecaller’s user growth in Q4 2021 was a very impressive 42%. Nearly 78 million people viewed the campaign on TikTok while the outdoor campaign reached 38 million people and 9.5 million viewed the dance challenge.

PinkNews

The Queer Catch-Up is PinkNews’ flagship LGBTQ+ show and, as the only show on the Snapchat platform with the word Queer in the title, serves as a hugely important resource for young LGBTQ+ people and allies to learn about LGBTQ+ life.

Launching in 2020, the show was aimed to catch the attention of Snapchat’s predominantly Gen Z users enabling PinkNews to become a global leader in LGBTQ+ content, focusing on spreading thoughtful, positive messaging and informative content about its community. As a publisher with a primarily Gen Z audience, PinkNews seeks to offer insightful, positive and educational stories about the LGBTQ+ community.

During 2021, it grew The Queer Catch-Up audience and subscriber base exponentially, reaching over 650,000 subscribers. As of August 2022, The Queer Catch-Up has 730,000 subscribers. PinkNews also more than doubled its average revenue per episode and its total revenue from the previous year.

Razorfish for Church & Dwight

Nair had been stagnant for about 20 years, with a 1.4% compound annual growth rate. Once a household name with a jingle known by all, it had lost relevance with a new generation of consumers.

The brand was at risk of being classified as a ‘value brand’, with no prospects for growth. So it launched a new campaign called ’Worship Yourself’ featuring people who had struggled with feeling sexy because of body features that were unique and made them different, including vitiligo, brows that are just too thick, braces that block your smile or just simply being the ‘wrong’ size.

The campaign heroines rejected the way others made them feel, with visual poems featuring the functional benefit of the product (smooth, hairless skin) but highlighting the deeper truth: that feeling sexy is amazing.

The results were immediate with a 20.9% year-on-year sales lift in the campaign’s first month, a 9.0% lift in unaided awareness with women aged 18-24 and a 594% increase in social following.

Salesforce

Connections, the tentpole show for Salesforce+, was created on the premise that audiences want personal journeys just as much as marketing insights in their business content. The show features Salesforce president and chief marketing officer, Sarah Franklin, having an extended conversation with business leaders from myriad industries about how to build connections with customers.

Throughout each episode, Franklin learns the unique personal experiences that enable each guest to be one of today’s most innovative marketers. The series also acted as a leader for more original programming on Salesforce+.

Each episode of Connections ends with a call to action for visitors to jump from YouTube to Salesforce+ and the series is used to establish performance benchmarks across both sites.

The series exceeded all internal benchmarks for video performance. To date, the series has racked up over 18m views and 1m hours of watch time on YouTube. Connections also has the highest clickthrough rate of any original Salesforce content. Over 60% of Connections viewers were reached by mobile ads.