When ASOS Brand Media Lead Leila King joined the global online fashion retailer in 2024 with seven years of experience in media planning, she set out to find the right media mix to inspire Gen Z to join the fashion-loving ASOS community.
For a younger audience, fashion is more than what they wear. It’s about their look, their personality, how they fit in with their friendship group.
At ASOS, we built our brand around helping 20-somethings show up as their full selves, with style that feels current, personal and accessible.
As we grew to offer 1,000 fashion brands, we wanted to make sure our own brand message stayed strong.
We aim to be a fashion destination that inspires, reflects and earns its place in our customers’ lives, with an offering they can’t get anywhere else.
Channeling Gen Z’s emotions
We set out to find the right channels and formats to cut through and connect with our younger Gen Z audience.
We’d done internal studies to identify where Gen Z would be in the right mindset for inspiration and discovery, and learned that audio-visual really lands this kind of emotive messaging.
We saw an opportunity to try using a more traditional long-form hero asset in a variety of audio-visual channels, to connect with Gen Z and encourage them to spend more time with the ASOS brand voice.
Previously, we’d been using YouTube for short-form, talent-led product promotions. We wondered if we could land a long-form message on YouTube, in the same way as we might with a video-on-demand or streaming platform — could a different environment even boost the effectiveness of our creative?
Sharing versus broadcast and streaming
It was almost the reverse of the usual media strategy problem for many brands, where they’ve spent a lot on TV, and only then start to think about YouTube as an extension of that. We had mainly been focused on digital channels instead, and began to consider where the kind of long-form video we had previously only used in broadcast or streaming channels might fit alongside the YouTube activity we were already running.
So we worked with Kantar’s media placement optimisation service Context Lab to find out. We put YouTube head-to-head with a video streaming platform and a major U.K. broadcaster, testing responses to our “Night Shift by ASOS” video, cut from our “Inspired by ASOS” creative:
We already knew from research by Enders Analysis that Gen Z watches 2X as much video on sharing platforms like YouTube, compared to video streaming or video on demand. We decided to find out how our audience would respond to our brand message on YouTube compared with other channels.
We saw an uplift of 31% in brand awareness among 18-26 year-olds after seeing the creative in YouTube.
Kantar gathered a sample of U.K. based 18-34 year-olds, with a Gen Z sub-sample of 18-26 year-olds. The researchers compared people who saw the ad in each channel with those who didn’t. They asked whether they’d heard of ASOS, how they felt about us, and whether they’d be likely to buy from us.
YouTube delivered as strongly as the other channels on brand awareness across our wider audience of 18-34 year-olds, but cost 50% less than the video streaming platform, and 70% less than the U.K. broadcaster. YouTube also drove close to a 14% increase in the audience’s ability to connect the ASOS brand with our “Inspired by” messaging.
Better still, YouTube showed the strongest lift in consideration and favourability with the Gen Z sub-sample. We saw an uplift of 31% in brand awareness among 18-26 year-olds after seeing the creative in YouTube, compared with 25% for the video streaming platform and 27% for the broadcaster.
Video for cost-efficient inspiration
The results showed us not just how cost-efficient, but also how effective YouTube can be as part of an integrated audio-visual plan.
A wider brand study also showed us that YouTube works best to inspire our intended audience when our long-form, 60-second YouTube creatives are seen first, followed by 15-second cutdowns and 6-second bumpers, versus the cutdowns and bumpers alone.
YouTube has become a core part of our media strategy. It’s where we can cost-efficiently reach Gen Z when they’re in the right mindset for inspiration and discovery, and go beyond product promotion to land a consistent brand message.
