• by Colin Kirkland , December 22, 2023

YouTube has released its list of its most popular brand strategies, such as tapping into longer-form videos, as well as which ads performed best on the video-sharing app, listing campaigns from Apple, Louis Vuitton and Pepsi.

According to YouTube, Apple received 18 million views for its 90-minute-long video called “Study With Me,” which featured actor Storm Reid using various Apple devices to educate viewers about maximizing study time.

Louis Vuitton also ranked high on the list. Utilizing a similar long-form strategy as Apple, the French luxury fashion house shared a 20-minute-long fashion show featuring Spanish recording artist Rosalia and other celebrities. The video currently has over 13-million views.

Pepsi landed a top spot as well for its "use of formats, lengths, and style” across various campaigns.

However, the ads that gained the most attention -- attracting hundreds of millions of views -- fell under the company’s branded “Rise Up Baby” series of Bollywood-style music videos, intended to engage a younger global audience.

YouTube was used by more U.S. teens than any other social-media platform in 2023.

YouTube has also provided a list of suggested strategies that brands can make use of while planning campaigns in 2024.

Most notable is the importance of long-form video, especially since more people are watching YouTube videos on their televisions at home. In fact, YouTube ranked as viewers' most-watched platform on connected TVs for most of 2023, according to Nielsen.

Longer videos give creators and brands more time to tell a story, feature celebrities and trends, and engage users for a longer amount of time with a potentially more impactful result. For brands who did it best, YouTube mentions Nissan's four-hour listening experience and Samsung’s live-stream of its entire Galaxy S23 Ultra launch event (which has over 19 million views).

But despite the growing popularity of long-form video, YouTube's fastest-growing content format is still Shorts, and YouTube suggests brands expand their promotions to the feature originally based on TikTok's short-form video feed.

“When YouTube advertisers added a vertical creative asset to their Video Action Campaigns, they delivered 10% to 20% more conversions per dollar on Shorts than campaigns that used landscape assets alone,” the company states in a blog post.

Finally, YouTube suggests advertisers make use of emerging AI tools in order to maximize their campaign targeting and performance, stating that “ AI-powered Video Reach Campaign mixes on YouTube earned an average return on ad spend 3.7X higher than manually optimized campaigns.”