MANILA, PHILIPPINES – Over the past decade, YouTube has quickly established itself as an indispensable tool for brands and marketers. They use it to connect with their audiences, promote their products and services, and ultimately, achieve their business goals.
Creatives and storytellers have flocked to the platform to deliver their own takes and approaches on video narratives, presenting their brands in ways that continue to surprise, thrill, and engage viewers. Since 2020, the YouTube Works Awards has been recognizing the best of the best – the most effective and creative of these video campaigns.
This year’s edition brings a few new changes, as the Awards always does. One of the bigger updates is the establishment of three distinct Agency of the Year awards, going to media, creative, and specialty agencies.
The other change is the renaming of The Long and Short award to the Multiformat Storytelling award, recognizing that an effective and original video campaign must also resonate in long and short durations across all devices. This is due to the undeniable prevalence and influence of vertical short form video on social media, which has opened up a new world of opportunities in brand storytelling.
“The multiplicity of different types of formats that the creative aspect of storytelling has to adapt to, I think is the biggest change we’ve seen over the past few years,” said Liam Capati, Chief Media Officer at Publicis Media. “Another would be the ability to integrate with the media strategy as well. It has to go hand-in-hand to be able to deliver the impact on the business metrics.”
This observation is backed up by Emmanuel Ordinanza, VP and Head of Integrated Media at Nestlé Philippines. “From what I remember, when I actually first assessed some of the campaigns, they are very much on the side of creativity. But now, I think they illustrate very good indications of how YouTube actually works as a platform to help generate good business performance,” he said.
“I think the correlation of campaigns to business performance is actually very strong nowadays,” Emman added. “We’ve also seen some campaigns that actually generated more innovative executions; at the same time, they use a lot of tech to make the campaigns more relatable. There’s also a lot of looking at segmentations of the audiences to be able to deliver the right messaging.”
Other than the addition of more facets to creative marketing in the digital age, some jurors also note the pure increase in the quality of today’s best-executed campaigns.
“Storytelling is becoming more polarized,” said Peach Natividad, Chief Strategy Officer at BBDO Guerrero. “The ones that are really good are standing out even further; on the other hand, the ones that are lagging behind, it becomes clearer that they are. I hope that the ones that are clear – let’s say, very, very clear, moving forward quicker in the storytelling in terms of really elevating it – they set an example for the entire industry.”
“We see that those that had great storytelling had great results,” she adds. “I hope that serves as a beacon for everyone.”
Stay tuned for the results of the 2025 YouTube Works Awards Philippines, which will determine the top campaigns that will represent the country in the overall YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia.
adobo magazine is an official media partner of the YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia 2025.
