YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia jury commend entries that reflect full funnel approaches, deep creativity and holistic use of AI solutions on the platform

The high-profile jury of YouTube’s prestigious annual Southeast Asia awards talk to Campaign about highlights, trends, and learnings from this year’s batch of winning entries which showcase a great emphasis on AI, holistic marketing approaches, and creative impact.

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(From top-left) Lex Bradshaw-Zanger, chief marketing & digital officer South Asia Pacific, Middle East & North Africa Zone (SAPMENA), L'Oreal; Supphasit Chokmongkolsatian, chief strategy officer, Ogilvy Thailand; Tam Truong, group head of integrated media, data CRM & communications, Nestle Vietnam; VJ Anand, executive creative director EMEA + global creative operations, VaynerMedia; Emily Tan, global head of marketing, Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG); Deepika Nikhilender, chief solutions officer & executive director – programmatic practice, GroupM Nexus Asia Pacific; Sulin Lau, regional head of marketing & brand, Grab; Valerie Madon, chief creative officer, McCann Worldgroup Asia Pacific; Dennis Perez, digital marketing, media and commerce lead, Unilever beauty & wellbeing Southeast Asia; Kartika Guerrero, senior VP - digital distribution & partnership, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison; Laurent Thevenet, head of creative tech APAC, Publicis Groupe

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Last night, the winners of the second YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia were announced in Bangkok. A total of 681 entries were submitted from across the region, judged by over 80 jury members — experts in their local markets and disciplines, as well as a grand jury that convened in Singapore to pick the regional winners. The judging process took a cumulative 500 hours sifting through the best of the work.

Campaign Asia-Pacific sat in on the closed-door jury session to determine the regional winners. Besides the category criteria, the judges focused on overarching themes: the use of AI; creativity that tapped into culture; and the campaigns’ ability to be a part of a full funnel strategy that straddled brand building and performance. The judges brought their expertise, as well as cultural and marketing contexts to the evaluation. The winning entries invariably made a lasting impression, struck an emotional chord, and effectively targeted an intended audience, while optimally using YouTube’s rich canvas of formats and tools.

How Southeast Asia’s marketers are leveraging brand building to power business performance

YouTube has remained a powerhouse amid a regional media landscape in constant flux. Due to its ubiquity, brands invariably jostle to stand out, when it comes to both creativity and effectiveness.

What made the winner of the top honours for Southeast Asia— real estate developer Sammakorn from Thailand triumph was its compulsive rewatchability. The film makes light of the real estate firm (Sammakorn) being frequently confused for the very similarly named revenue department in Thailand (Sanpakorn) using typical self deprecating Thai humour. The jury picked the entry as the Grand Prix winner for its memorability; its appeal not just as a great work of advertising but as an entertaining film in its own right, and as one juror put it, “the one that I am most jealous of and the one that I would share.”

Diving deeper into individual categories, the abundance of options for reach and engagement across the marketing funnel makes YouTube a natural venue for brand launches or the revitalising of old products — the theme of The Big Bang. Grab's Sulin Lau, the Southeast Asia jury lead, as well as jury lead of The Big Bang and Force for Good categories, said that The Big Bang winner —Singapore-based online car marketplace Carro — was picked for its ability to use YouTube in an inspirational way. This will hopefully encourage other brands to try differentiated or experimental approaches.

YouTube’s status as a platform that attracts a diverse audience from across the region allows brands to seamlessly deploy differentiated strategies and also makes it a great venue for purpose-driven work. While judging ‘Force for Good’, judges gravitated towards entries that were not blatantly commercial. Instead they focused on the use of YouTube as either a provocation or entertainment to trigger discussion, emphasise a larger mission, and sustain momentum for a cause, well exemplified in the winning entry from leading Indonesian bank BCA with its entertaining take on a serious issue such as fraud.

Jury lead Sulin Lau on the Grand Prix winner, and winning entries for The Big Bang, and Force for Good

As a category that is extremely germane to how YouTube is used and what sets it apart, Long & Short was the most hotly debated, given the judges high standards and expectations.

The jury was clear that the best way to treat multiple formats was to focus on the audiences and objectives. Being a platform that aggregated audiences for both sorts of messaging gives YouTube a distinct edge. None of the entries entirely hit the mark on what the jury was looking for, but an entry from Pepsi from Vietnam won a commendation in the Long & Short category for exploring two different formats: a music video and a very emotional interview. The campaign's view through rates were also impressive. However the jury believed that agencies and brands need to do better. They were clear that the long format should have a distinct role from that of a shorter cut. Jury lead VJ Anand from VaynerMedia cautioned against the tendency towards “matching luggage” — teardowns or shorter edits of a longer film, instead creating a unique purpose and a differentiated role for a short film.

Jury lead VJ Anand on the entry that won a commendation in The Long & Short

How local culture and storytelling is powering a Southeast Asian creative renaissance

Creativity on YouTube is not just nice to have but is a business imperative in a fast-paced digitally driven world where capturing attention and driving results requires bold, innovative thinking. Best Brand Story celebrated these groundbreaking creative approaches and innovations. Jury lead McCann's Valerie Madon zeroed in on entries that leveraged the power of entertainment to engage YouTube’s wide range of audiences. “Marketers should be conscious of pushing the boundaries when it comes to entertaining people,” she said. Sammakorn from Thailand ticked all these boxes and was judged the winner of Best Brand Story.

Jury lead Valerie Madon on the winning entry for Best Brand Story

Creativity is also a differentiator in festive related marketing. While YouTube is a huge destination for festival related content — from recipes to stories around traditions and rituals — several campaigns play along broadly similar themes and are very promotional. For the Best of Festive category, jury lead, L'Oreal's Lex Bradshaw-Zanger said that it’s important for marketers to straddle various themes while dialling down commercial or product-driven elements. The winning entry was from Malaysia’s RHB Bank.

Jury lead Lex Bradshaw-Zanger on the winning entry for Best of Festive

Creative campaigns on YouTube are often incomplete without harnessing the prowess of people who tell stories on it for a living — YouTube creators. Unilever's Dennis Perez who led the Brands & Creators category had strong opinions about success yardsticks. Through the course of deliberations, the jurors agreed that campaigns should not merely use creators as ambassadors or influencers, but rather as an impactful creative force, amply demonstrated by category winner Nescafe CLC Espresso Roast from Thailand.

Jury lead Dennis Perez on the winning entry for Brands & Creators

Uncorking the power of AI to achieve better effectiveness and ROI

Last year, AI-themed work was deemed too nascent for there to be a Southeast Asia level winner despite there being several national winners. The elusive Best of Google AI trophy was awarded for the first time at a regional level to a campaign from Indonesia for Grab. The jury was clear that it wanted to go past simple media optimisation for a more holistic impact of AI across insight, content, and critically, measurement deployed across the value chain. They were also clear that the category was a “blank canvas” with benchmarks constantly being set and reset.

Jury lead Laurent Thevenet from Publicis Groupe pointed to the effectiveness of the winning campaign which impressively deployed Google AI’s full spectrum of solutions.

Jury lead Laurent Thevenet on the winning entry for Best of Google AI

Media is an area where AI has already made inroads. In Masters of Media, the judges looked for a balance of media strategy and excellence in execution within the YouTube ecosystem, and a campaign that delivered on the business goals outlined in the brief, according to jury lead Deepika Nikhilender from GroupM Nexus. GrabFood from Thailand won top honours. The judges commended its data-driven approach to understand and segment the audience, and to tailor the creative using AI to deliver personalised messaging using the most relevant signals — for instance geographic and time-based cues. Engaging storytelling gave Grab an extra edge.

Jury lead Deepika Nikhilender on the winning entry for Masters of Media

With multiple options for personalised messages, ability to reach specific niches within an overarching audience, and numerous opportunities for full funnel engagement, YouTube has again underscored its position as an optimal solution in the otherwise fragmented and geographically disparate Southeast Asian media landscape. The winners are a testimony both to the resilience of the platform and the creativity and ingenuity of Southeast Asian agencies and marketers, intent on breaking new ground with every campaign.

To see the full list of winners and view the winning case studies, please visit the YouTube Works Southeast Asia Awards website.

Source:

Campaign Asia

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