YouTube Music

Portal to NYE

An all-access social campaign for New Year’s Eve’s biggest party.

As the new year drew near, YouTube Music came to Stink Studios to create an all-access social experience as the presenting partner of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, the annual year-end broadcast that culminates in the iconic ball drop in Times Square.

We shot, designed and delivered a one-night campaign on @youtubemusic that highlighted their exclusive access to performances and backstage interviews with 15 of the year's biggest names in music during the 5 hour event.

To create this campaign, we expanded on YouTube music’s established design language to form a bespoke visual direction. Through typographic animations, metadata tickers, and graphic lighting details, we shaped a global perspective on this collective moment in time, celebrated in music.

The content was constructed from a set of flexible motion templates for footage and stills. Our motion framework — titled Portal To 2019 — consisted of animation gestures inspired by the idea of closing a door on the past and stepping confidently into the future.

As we developed creative and captured footage, we outlined a detailed content map to aid us in crafting a narrative and visual rhythm through the course of the night. All told, we prepared over 100 assets for Instagram stories and posts, as well as for Twitter.

We shot all the live performance footage on the new Google Pixel 3, highlighting its low light and Motion Photo capabilities throughout the run-of-show. During live capture, we utilized Google Photos to sync the phones’ image and video libraries for real-time review in the studio.

We highlighted YouTube Music’s exclusive access by pairing music performances with behind-the-scenes interviews and candid moments from throughout the night.

Altogether, this design-led approach to the social broadcast shaped a companion content experience that elevated and dimensionalized the live event. The coverage generated a total of 76.9K engagements and 4.1M owned impressions, and the Instagram Story retained 96% of viewers over 41 posts.