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As a marketer, the challenge of how to win a viewers attention might be one that keeps you up at night.
Audiences are no longer passive viewers. They choose to watch as part of a community via Connected TV, skip ads that don’t speak to them, and turn to trusted creators for recommendations when they’re actively shopping.
Welcome to the YouTube era.
To win in this new era, we’ve looked at Dutch brands who’ve successfully won the audience’s attention, and the lessons you can learn from them.
1. Hack user habits
Some audiences, especially gamers and younger demographics, have a reflex to click the “skip” button the second an ad appears.
Dutch telco KPN and its social agency, team5pm, leaned into the behaviour to win attention. They created fake mid-rolls that replicated the YouTube ad interface — complete with a yellow progress bar and a 5-second countdown.
Instead of a standard skippable ad, viewers were met with a hardcoded, organic comedic skit by a creator. The series achieved 1.2 million views , but the ads themselves were the strongest driver of sponsor awareness — contributing to a spontaneous sponsor awareness of 96%.
The marketing takeaway: Don’t fight user habits; design your creative to hack those habits for a narrative twist.
2. Sync with lifestyle loops
Traditional performance marketing relies on short-term promotional bursts. However, consumer buying habits — like grocery shopping for the weekend — are continuous and repeating.
Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn shifted to a persistent “weekend-rhythm-pulse” ad strategy, using a long-term view of its consumers’ buying habits.
They turned a catchy track into a cultural anthem when they created a music video featuring singing icon Corry Konings and creator Bram Krikke. Then dynamically adapted it into tailored creatives serving distinct funnel roles (discovery, reinforcement, reminder), preventing creative wear-out over five months.
The ad drove a cultural moment, with 1.1 million views on the music video alone, and viewers demanding a Spotify release of the song. It also directly boosted the retailer’s BBQ revenue by 27% and drinks revenue by 12%.
The marketing takeaway: Align your media planning cadence with the real-world recurring rhythm of your consumer’s lifestyle, not your internal calendar.
3. Leapfrog creative constraints
For brands with modest budgets, creating ads that stand out in the expensive seasonal period is challenging.
KPN and agency Dentsu Creative decided to produce a holiday campaign combining the teams’ creativity and the production power of AI video tool Veo. This allowed them to create a hyper-real visual story impossible to film in the real world, featuring their long-term mascot Louis the cat.
The creative was distributed using AI-driven media targeting on YouTube to reach the right viewers efficiently. And by doing this, it saw a 54% completion rate — significantly higher than KPN’s traditional benchmarks.
The marketing takeaway: Treat AI as a dual engine for both rapid creative production and multi-format asset distribution to maximise budget efficiency.
4. Capture communal viewing experiences
Festival organiser Q-dance and agency team5pm wanted to grow Dutch music festival Defqon.1’s audience attention from a three-day physical event, into a year-round digital brand.
They turned to YouTube and Connected TV (CTV) to allow for live festival watching via shared experiences in the living room. This was combined with Shorts for snackable pre-festival anticipation, and longform sets post-event engagement.
The CTV placement drove a 72% increase in unique livestream viewers and 3.5 million impressions, while pre-festival Shorts views grew by over 4.5X.
The marketing takeaway: Use high-impact CTV placements as a communal centrepiece, then surround it with short- and long-form content to extend the campaign lifecycle.
5. Understand your audiences concerns
When users face health anxieties, they can find the volume of information available online overwhelming.
Dutch healthcare provider Thuisarts drove behavioural change and built trust by creatively counter-positioning their services against this. They employed animations of search-engine symptom pop-ups that eventually cleared to reveal the calm, expert-backed Thuisarts interface.
They paired this creative with strict demographics in mind, including students with humorous but relatable scenarios and young parents with baby health prompts.
Spontaneous brand awareness rose from 41% to 46% (hitting 56% among students) and the ads delivered over 1 million views, successfully reducing unnecessary GP visits.
The marketing takeaway: Build authority by using empathetic, precision-targeted creative that addresses the specific needs of your audience.
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