'/%3e%3cdefs%3e%3clinearGradient%20id='paint0_linear_239_73'%20x1='296'%20y1='0'%20x2='168'%20y2='144'%20gradientUnits='userSpaceOnUse'%3e%3cstop%20offset='0.255208'%20stop-color='%2300AFFE'/%3e%3cstop%20offset='0.770833'%20stop-color='%2300F8B6'/%3e%3c/linearGradient%3e%3c/defs%3e%3c/svg%3e)
- SEA
- Social Ads
- Creatives
The starting point
North makes some of the best films in its category, and its community watches them. The next audience was the riders who did not yet know the brand, worldwide, and reaching them at scale meant paid distribution built with the same care as the films themselves.
The second half of the brief was measurement. Impressions are easy to buy; what North wanted to know was whether a technical audience actually watched, and stayed. Brand and measurement are often presented as a trade-off. North wanted both, and there is no good reason a brand should have to choose.
What we did
Distribution run like a performance account, with the creative measured on the one term that matters for a brand film: did the right people watch it to the end.
- 01
Audiences built from behaviour, not proxies
Custom-intent and competitor audiences assembled from real search and viewing behaviour, so the films reached people already interested in the sport. The person who watched three foil reviews last week is a better bet than an algorithm’s guess about who resembles them.
- 02
Long-form for depth, short cuts for frequency
The hero films ran for depth and the short cuts drove frequency, each measured on its own terms rather than blended into a single number, so we could see what each format was doing.
- 03
Multilingual, geographically weighted
Copy per stream in each market’s language, with geographic weighting moved week by week toward the regions delivering engaged views. Riders are global, and the budget followed where they were watching.
- 04
Measured per creative, every week
Completion, watch time and cost per view tracked for every asset, with budget moved to what the audience was finishing. On a brand film, the second half of the view is the part that does the work, so that is the part we paid attention to.
The impact
A 44% full completion rate on the hero video, on a technical audience with every reason to skip. Nearly half the people who started the film watched it to the end.
At a cost per view of two cents at scale on YouTube. The brand investment now has a number beside it every week, and the budget follows the number.
