Nescafé, YouTube Shorts Brand Experiment
Project Overview
Nescafé (Nestlé) needed to strengthen brand awareness and drive ad recall in Saudi Arabia, one of the most competitive consumer markets in the EMEA region. The question was not whether to invest in YouTube Shorts, but how to make that investment work as hard as possible for an upper-funnel brand campaign.
Working with the Nescafé team, Pixelique Digital designed and executed a three-armed YouTube Shorts creative experiment in 2025, testing different creative approaches against each other with Brand Lift measurement to identify which drove the strongest results for awareness and recall.
Challenge & Context
Nescafé needed to drive brand awareness and ad recall in Saudi Arabia. The challenge was finding the right creative approach for YouTube Shorts, balancing polished brand advertising with authentic, platform-native content to maximise upper-funnel impact.
-
YouTube Shorts demands platform-native creative that feels native to the feed, traditional brand ads often underperform without careful adaptation.
-
Deciding whether to optimise existing brand assets for Shorts or invest in purpose-built creative, both approaches carry different production costs and creative risks.
-
Measuring real brand impact, not just clicks and views, required a rigorous Brand Lift study methodology across a target audience of Males and Females aged 18–45 with relevant affinity segments.
Our Approach
Rather than guess which creative would perform best, we designed a controlled three-armed experiment to generate definitive data. Each arm served a distinct creative hypothesis against the same audience simultaneously:
The existing Nescafé brand creative served as the control baseline, unchanged, as originally produced for broadcast or standard digital.
Re-edited to follow YouTube Shorts best practices: immediate action from frame one, tight framing on the driver's face, dynamic sound design, early and recurring product appearances, organic branding, and a see-and-say call to action.
A purpose-built behind-the-scenes creative featuring the camera crew, stunt driving, the camera rig, raw ungraded footage, and unpolished audio, director's "roll camera", clapperboard clicks, car revving, deliberately imperfect for platform authenticity.
Measurement was conducted via a Brand Lift study, tracking awareness and ad recall across Male/Female audiences aged 18–45 with relevant affinity targeting across Saudi Arabia.
What We Delivered
This engagement went beyond placing ads, it was structured as a rigorous creative science experiment designed to generate learnings that would inform future Nescafé campaigns at scale:
-
Creative Strategy & Experiment Design, Defined the three creative hypotheses, structured the experiment arms, and aligned on measurement objectives before a single frame was edited or shot.
-
Shorts ABCD Optimisation, Applied YouTube's Shorts creative best practices (Attention, Branding, Connection, Direction) to the existing brand asset, re-editing for an immediate hook, consistent product visibility, and platform-native pacing and sound design.
-
Behind-the-Scenes Production Direction, Directed and produced the authentic "Made for Shorts" creative, capturing raw on-set footage of stunt driving, camera rigs, and crew interaction, designed to feel native to the Shorts feed while remaining clearly on-brand for Nescafé.
-
Brand Lift Measurement Setup, Configured the Brand Lift study across all three arms, defining control and exposed groups, setting study objectives for awareness and ad recall, and running the campaign through to statistical significance.
Results & Learnings
The Brand Lift study produced clear, actionable results, and a valuable strategic learning about the trade-off between awareness and recall on YouTube Shorts:
-
The Shorts ABCD-optimised ad delivered the highest awareness lift at +6.6% (versus +3.2% for the original baseline), plus +1.7% ad recall lift, proving that structured ABCD optimisation significantly amplifies brand awareness performance on Shorts.
-
The behind-the-scenes "Made for Shorts" ad delivered the highest ad recall lift at +6.0% (versus +4.0% for the original baseline), demonstrating that authentic, unpolished content is highly memorable even when awareness lift is more modest at +1.1%.
-
Key learning: Polished ABCD creative is the right tool for driving top-of-funnel brand awareness. Authentic behind-the-scenes creative drives stronger memory encoding and ad recall. Campaign objective should always determine which creative format to lead with.
"An incredible and eye-opening learning experience that showcases the power of collaboration and demonstrates how small changes can drive meaningful impact and deliver strong results."
— Zaina Ali, Senior Brand Manager, Nescafé
Frequently Asked
The Shorts ABCDs are YouTube's creative best practices for the Shorts format: Attention (hook the viewer in the first second), Branding (show your brand early and regularly), Connection (create an emotional or relatable moment), and Direction (give viewers a clear call to action). Following these principles optimises your creative for the platform's algorithm, viewer behaviour, and short attention spans, which directly translates into higher brand awareness lift compared to repurposing standard broadcast ads without adaptation.
Ad recall measures whether someone remembers seeing your ad, not just whether they recognised the brand. Authentic, unexpected creative breaks the pattern of what viewers expect, which creates stronger memory encoding. The raw audio (clapperboard clicks, director's voice, engine revving), ungraded footage, and visible crew all signal "this is real", far more attention-grabbing and memorable on Shorts than a polished brand ad. The surprise factor drives recall. Awareness, by contrast, is better served by consistent, structured brand signals, which is exactly why the ABCD-optimised ad excelled there.
Brand Lift studies work by splitting the audience into two groups: an exposed group who see the ads, and a control group who do not. Both groups are then surveyed with identical brand questions covering awareness, ad recall, consideration, and intent. The difference in survey responses between the two groups, measured as a percentage point lift, is the Brand Lift. Google's Brand Lift tool runs this automatically within YouTube campaigns, delivering statistically significant results without relying on clicks, view-through rates, or other proxy metrics that don't directly measure brand perception.
Absolutely. Shorts can be more accessible for smaller brands precisely because authentic, behind-the-scenes creative, which this experiment showed drives exceptional ad recall, requires less production budget than polished brand films. A well-crafted Shorts campaign built around genuine storytelling, strong hooks, and early product visibility can deliver meaningful brand lift without high production costs. The key is matching creative format to campaign objective: use ABCD-optimised creative for awareness goals, and authentic platform-native content when memorability and recall are the priority.