MANILA, PHILIPPINES – The YouTube Works Awards, in partnership with Kantar, is an esteemed program that celebrates the most innovative, creative, and effective advertising campaigns on YouTube. Held across numerous markets globally, these awards recognize how brands and agencies leverage the power of YouTube to connect with audiences and drive significant business results.
For 2025, Google is excited to announce that the YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia will once again shine a spotlight on the region’s advertising prowess, with the Philippines playing a key role and the winners set to be revealed at an awards night in October 2025. This provides a platform for Filipino brands and agencies to showcase their best work and compete on a regional stage.
The best of Filipino video advertising
The YouTube Works Awards consistently highlights emerging trends and successful strategies in video advertising. Drawing inspiration from past winners and industry observations, several key themes resonate in today’s landscape:
- Pain Point = Best Point: This trend emphasizes transforming a perceived disadvantage or consumer pain point into a creative starting point for a campaign. By acknowledging and addressing a real issue, brands can build authenticity and connect with audiences on a deeper level.
- Based on a True Story: Campaigns that draw on real social issues or authentic experiences tend to resonate strongly. By touching on relatable truths, brands can evoke genuine emotion and make the audience feel more involved and connected to the narrative.
- Local Culture Marketing: Turning local culture into a central selling point allows brands to tap into national pride and create highly relevant and memorable content. By embracing local nuances, traditions, and humor, campaigns can feel more authentic and connect deeply with the target audience.
- Data and AI Tools: The strategic use of data and AI tools is crucial for reaching the right audience at the right time and place. These technologies enable precise targeting, optimization, and personalization, maximizing the impact and effectiveness of YouTube campaigns.
A prime example of impactful localization and creative effectiveness is the “Cool” campaign by GIGIL Manila for Coco Tea, which was recognized as “Best of Philippines” at the YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia 2024.
This campaign successfully tapped into a relatable cultural insight in the Philippines: the stress experienced by many. Featuring Filipino veteran journalist Ces Drilon in a popular play on her name (“Stress Drilon”), the campaign positioned Coco Tea as a source of stress relief, specifically highlighting the act of stabbing the straw through the cup’s plastic cover as a cathartic moment.
The campaign’s ability to connect with a prevalent local “pain point” and weave it into a creative narrative resonated strongly with Filipino audiences, contributing to its recognition and success. It exemplifies how understanding and leveraging local culture can lead to highly effective and award-winning advertising on YouTube.
Other examples of creative localization around the region include the award-winning ad of Thai real estate developer Sammakorn, which took a common misunderstanding of its name (which sounded like the Thai word for “revenue”) and used it as the focal point of a witty campaign that won the SEA Grand Prix.
In the ad, Sammakorn poked fun at customers mistakenly calling them thinking it was the country’s Revenue Department and the company’s employees’ exasperation at the mix-ups. The misunderstanding lays the foundation for a funny and memorable advertising campaign that definitely sticks with the viewer.
There’s also the award-winning campaigns from Malaysia’s RHB Bank, which draws from a relatable story about a mother risking it all to reward her child, and Indonesia’s Bank Central Asia, which takes the country’s very real problems with online fraud and magnifies it with a dramatic yet educational short film. With localization, the possibilities and variations are endless.
As the leading platform for long-form and short-form video content across devices, YouTube has always caught and retained people’s attention — earning more viewership than TV and other streaming platforms, as well as dominating the advertising space in the field of modern media. With over two billion active users, marketers see this wide audience as an opportunity to tap into their current and potential markets. And with a limitless range of tastes in content consumption, the number of ways to approach viewers are endless.
While most award-giving bodies recognize campaigns as a holistic idea interspersed among different media, YouTube Works Awards creates a unique edge by honing in on the creatives’ ability to only utilize videos to convey their message. Through this method, advertisers are encouraged to tap into the different findings, and cultural and behavioral information that are useful to communicate and resonate with their target markets.
This is what makes the platform such a fun playground for advertisers — and what also makes YouTube Works Awards one of the most competitive and exciting award shows, and one of the most coveted recognitions in the busy advertising industry.
The YouTube Works Awards 2025 is still accepting submissions until May 13, 2025. Join now and be recognized among the very best of Southeast Asian marketing, advertising, and creativity. Submit your entry here: youtube.com/ads/youtube-works/sea/#sea-submission-form
Go to youtube.com/ads/youtube-works/sea/ to learn more about the YouTube Works Awards
