case study
Fentanyl Education on YouTube Ads: 76K+ Youths Engaged, 27% Conversion Rate
The Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen collaborated on a “Youth Fentanyl Awareness” YouTube ad campaign to educate young adults 13-24 on the danger of fentanyl, a lethal drug that is widely present in many popular illicit/fake prescription drugs. With a goal of driving time spent on site, we needed to drive users from YouTube videos to a landing page where they could engage with a wealth of educational content. The campaign wrapped with a 1.75% CTR, 27% Conversion Rate, and over 76,000 young adults engaging with educational content around the dangers of fentanyl.
#FentanylAwareness
#YouthDrugEducation
#DigitalMarketingSuccess
#SocialGoodAdvertising
#YouTubeMarketing
Introduction
The Ad Council is a nonprofit organization founded in 1942 by giants of the advertising industry with the aim that the power of advertising can be used in service of social good. The Ad Council works with partners ranging from other nonprofit organizations to the US government in order to promote public service announcements on pressing social issues.
Drug overdose deaths in people ages 10-19 more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, and 84% of these deaths involved illicit fentanyl. In 2020 alone, 76% of drug deaths in people ages 14-23 involved fentanyl. Fentanyl has no smell, taste, or appearance, and it takes just a small dosage to be lethal. The Ad Council launched the “Youth Fentanyl Awareness” campaign in order to educate youth on the dangers of fentanyl and how to spot signs of an overdose in order to save a life.
As a part of this campaign, the Ad Council invited former drug dealers to teach high school for a day so the students could gain a comprehensive understanding of this issue from someone close to it. The Ad Council then created a landing page, “The Real Deal on Fentanyl” to amplify the lessons taught to those students. Video clips from the lessons were served on YouTube targeting young adults 13-24. The objective of this campaign is to drive users to the landing page to spend at least 20 seconds browsing through the wealth of information that is available.
With the amount of work that we had to do in a small amount of time, we’re very pleased with how quickly Llama Lead Gen was able to understand our organization in order to navigate between project management for our teams and with our platform partners.
Felicia Carmichael
Director of Media, Social and Emerging @ Ad Council
The Challenge
The Ad Council came to Llama Lead Gen to help refine its media strategy around the Fentanyl Awareness campaign. They need to reach young adults 13-24 who may be starting to get exposed to illicit drugs so that they can make educated decisions and fully understand the risks.
One key challenge in this campaign from a media perspective is reaching the younger portion of our audience, 13-17, as there are stricter limitations on reaching this group. Additionally, with the main objective being Time Spent on Site (20s+), this is a multi-step process to get users interested in the message to click off of YouTube to the landing page and ensure that the information resonates for them to spend at least 20 seconds engaging with the content.
The Ad Council looked to partner with Llama Lead Gen to solidify their approach, as it is critical for us to find the most relevant audience within this age group to spread this important message. With the past success of campaigns between Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen, we were able to leverage this existing trust and relationship to collaborate on a marketing plan.
Strategy
With a wealth of video content available for this campaign as well as an aim to reach a younger audience, the Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen chose YouTube as the main platform for this campaign.
Across YouTube, we are able to leverage target youths and young adults 13-24. The strategy was to break up the age groups and target them by different interests. For the youth 13-17 age group, we targeted frequent users of various popular social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, etc to present them with the real facts on fentanyl.
For A18-24 we targeted those with an affinity towards live events (concerts, sporting events) and nightlife. The aim is to reach those who are likely to be in situations where illicit drugs are present to ensure they are aware of the danger of fentanyl as well as the knowledge of how to reverse an overdose.
We monitored the campaign performances and made weekly budget optimizations, moving budgets based on audience performance. A mix of videos was leveraged to allow platform optimization flexibility. Each video targeted different parts of the broader issue around fentanyl: how to reverse an overdose, how to detect the presence of fentanyl, and why fentanyl is so widely present. Llama Lead Gen worked with the team to develop various video ad descriptions to capture the full spectrum of the issue and encourage our audience to learn the facts to protect themselves and their friends.
Solution & Implementation
After gaining a full understanding of the strategy and goals of this campaign, we started by collaborating with the Ad Council to align on finalizing ad copy for the ads as well as ensure that the target audiences that we have selected resonate. The Llama Lead Gen team took full ownership of the execution of the campaign set up within the YouTube platform.
The campaign was launched after careful QA to ensure that our campaigns, audiences, and ads were set up properly. Our team monitored the performance daily and adjusted the budget accordingly based on what ads and audiences were performing well. Shifting dollars into more efficient audiences and ads.
One challenge that we had foreseen in the setup of the campaign was the difficulty of reaching users 13-17 due to stricter advertising rules against targeting this age group. The team experimented with targeting lookalikes and optimized targeting in order to find ways to encourage ad spending against this age group.
The Llama Lead Gen team is one of the strongest examples I have personally witnessed of a good balance in distribution of labor. Every member on the team was actively involved in leading various meetings, offering suggestions to improve campaign performance.
rasheia harris
Digital Media Director @ Ad Council
Performance & Data
The KPI of this campaign was to drive conversions on the landing page, defined as keeping a user engaged on the website for at least 20 seconds. Mid-funnel KPIs such as clickthrough rates and landing page views provided additional data points to gauge the success of each audience/creative to guide optimization decisions. Throughout the campaign, we were able to drive a total of 285K click-throughs and 76,465 sessions that are over 20 seconds at an average cost-per-conversion of $3.14.
Tracking the flow of users through a multi-step process, we saw that out of the 285K users who clicked through to the ads, over a quarter (27%) of those users stayed engaged with “The Real Deal on Fentanyl” landing page for more than 20 seconds. This is a strong indication that we were able to seek out qualified users and that the landing page content was useful and engaging.
Outside of the lower funnel metrics, this campaign was able to generate mass reach for our messaging, garnering 16M impressions, 3M video views, and 5.3M interactions.
3,000,000
Video Views
285,188
Clicks (9.5% clicked out of 3mm video views)
76,456
Conversions (27% conversion rate from clicks)
All of our campaigns were successful. Because of Llama Lead Gen's management of the media - we spent our budgets in full, had low CPMs and reached our objectives.
Laurie Keith
VP of Media, Social and Emerging @ Ad Council
Moving Forward
With an undetectable killer like fentanyl becoming ever more present in popular illicit drugs, the Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen set out to educate teens and young adults on the dangers of this drug. By leveraging YouTube, a video platform with a significant reach and popular with our target audience, we were able to get 76,000 youths to engage with our educational content around various facets of the fentanyl issue. Additionally, the campaign received over 16 million impressions, 5.3 million interactions, and 285,000 clicks.
There were many learnings throughout the campaign. Due to the platform restrictions around targeting users under 18, we saw that the majority of the campaign spending went towards the 18-24 age group. In future iterations of the campaign, we recommend a different approach that can work around reaching the 13-17 audience by targeting YouTube channels and affinity groups that align more with this age group.
From a creative perspective, given that most of the impressions were served to A18-24, we recommended building additional creatives that featured scenarios more relevant to this life stage as the hero creatives of “The Real Deal” campaign featured mainly high schoolers.
The Ad Council's satisfaction with the campaign's performance is a testament to its success and the efficacy of our strategic approach. The results speak volumes about our impact together, with the campaign's impressive reach and deep engagement among the target demographic.
If you aim to tap into the extensive reach of YouTube to engage with your audience effectively, let's connect. Book a call with Llama Lead Gen, and allow us to assist you in utilizing YouTube marketing to its fullest potential, ensuring your campaign objectives are not just met but exceeded.
