[left to right: Carl Tart, Jeenie Weenie, LaurDIY and Ian Hecox]
The YouTube social team didn’t just make content this summer — they produced a game show that could rival anything you’d see on TV. Taped at VidCon and released last week, it premiered first on YouTube before rolling out to TikTok and beyond.
The project reinforces YouTube’s identity as a streaming platform — and taps into the broader brand trend toward TV-style content.
To dig deeper, I spoke with the masterminds behind the show: YouTube’s Global Head of Brand + Social Editorial Red Fabbri and Senior Social Product Marketing Manager Kate Bryant. Together, they lead YouTube’s editorial social strategy — which isn’t about pushing campaign briefs, but about deepening brand love by reflecting the culture of YouTube, mass culture, and creator culture back to its community.
We talked about how they pulled off a full-blown game show in just six weeks, the challenges they face (yes, even YouTube’s social team has a budget and ROI pressures), and what they’re prioritizing next.
Note: We chatted for a full hour (!) so I had to trim this down for the newsletter. Paid subscribers get to read the outtakes and insights in a bonus newsletter.
ICYMI: Guys, I’m excited to chat. In your own words, can you explain why we’re talking today?
Kate Bryant: I’m personally a really big fan of game shows and game shows as social content. When I was at Nintendo doing YouTube content, the majority of our things were some form of “Developers play the Newlywed Game,” or, “Let's do trivia.” I really love gamified content, so I wanted to bring that here.
So we decided to pitch a game show for VidCon. It was inspired by some of the really popular online video game shows right now. Things like Dropout, things like After Midnight, where you have a full episode, but you also have all these really fun, short clips that are going around. So we built it with that in mind.
Red Fabbri: And it naturally lined up with YouTube 20, the 20th anniversary. So it's a great excuse to throw something celebratory while not seeming too self-aggrandising. And then the other thing is my background is in TV, and for so long, television networks and shows have thrived on social and on YouTube by clipping out their long-form video into social content, especially short-form vertical. And we felt like, “We're YouTube, why can't we do that?”
ICYMI: I saw the show at VidCon. Originally, I thought it was going to be just another panel but the execution was on a par with the Price Is Right or Family Feud. The scope was massive. So I want to break this down in three ways: How do you get inspired to create something like this? How do you get it approved? And then how do you actually make it happen?
Red: Well, let's start with approved. Kate buried the lead here, she's been trying to make a game show at YouTube for the entire time. And in the year, plus a little before, that I've been her manager. I've been like, “Absolutely. We're doing that.”
We tend to do a lot of pilots and see how they work, so we positioned this as a pilot. It's a swing, and if it does well, people do more. It's part of the process.
But also we’ve built up trust in our leaders — my manager, Marly Ellis, our VP, Kate Stanford, and Danielle Tiedt, our CMO — to know that we are pushing this because there is a business need for us to continue to innovate here as a brand, but also as a social marketing group. If it works well for this, it could be used for some of our campaign and marketing messaging as well.
After that, it was just being very methodical in our normal process of “This is what we're doing. This is the budget for it. This is what we would like to get out of it. The goal is this, but also here's the insight that drove it.” And I can tell you right now, those insights are driven by our YouTube 20 deep campaign that's been running all year.
We tend to do a lot of pilots and see how they work, so we positioned this as a pilot. It's a swing, and if it does well, people do more.
ICYMI: Let me butt in one second. You said “based on insights from YouTube 20.” Was it a demand for nostalgia, or some sort of YouTube retrospective? What insights did you see?
Kate: I think nostalgia drives a lot. It's been an interesting year learning about what nostalgia means to people. Red and I are a year apart. And when you ask a 15 year old what they're nostalgic for, it's not what Red and I are nostalgic for. So, certainly that was a big inside driver. You've got to be nostalgic, but you've got to get to the right level of nostalgia.
The joke that fell the flattest was the Mobile Leprechaun. That's one of the funniest earliest YouTube videos. But kids don't know that reference. So that one didn't quite land.
It's my sixth YouTube VidCon and I went to VidCon previously, and it can be hard to translate what is happening at VidCon into something that is entertaining for people that weren't at VidCon. So we always have panels at VidCon. We've occasionally taped and released them, but it hasn't been a very frequent thing. So this year, I really just wanted to see, can we engineer a panel at VidCon that is designed for viewers at home? My personal insight was, “We're gonna make a VOD, and then we've got a lot of Shorts content that will be coming out now that we've got the full video up on our channel.”
I really just wanted to see, can we engineer a panel at VidCon that is designed for viewers at home?
ICYMI: How do you translate a live event to the audience at home?
Kate: Red and I are both comedy nerds, and it was very important to us that we had a comedy writer doing this. I personally felt very strongly about having someone that had a television background and also had an improv background to be the live person to move things along.
We were able to get Carl Tart, who's a great comedy writer. He had the background in designing these games or these questions to make content that could be clipped and would be funny. So Carl wrote most of the game show for us. He did an amazing job.
And then finding creators, again trying to hit that nostalgic sweet spot. It was important to me that we had creators that were relevant today, but also considered OG. So obviously, having Ian from Smosh, he's been on YouTube since almost day one. LaurDIY is another one that's been around for a really long time. And then Jeenie Weenie has been around for a long time, but she was really seeing a popularity surge recently.
[left to right: Kate Bryant, Carl Tart, LaurDIY, Jeenie Weenie, Ian Hecox, Red Fabbri]
ICYMI: How easy was it to get the creators on board? What was your elevator pitch for getting them involved?
Red: So, we are lucky. It's easy to get creators on board because we asked them to be our collaborators, not just talent showing up. So for all three of them, it was, “Hey, we want to do this. We want to invite you to a game show, but we want you to bring yourself. We want you to help us with it. And most importantly, we want it to be entertaining.”
VidCon is a day that they are already there. They're doing a bunch of stuff. They came on and had fun with us. We're making content out of it. We're sending it to them. They can post it if they want. Whether it's Carl or the contestants, they were bought in because they were partners in the creative but, most importantly, we made it fun and easy to be a part of.
ICYMI: I just realized I should have asked you, how long did it take this to put together?
Kate: That was actually very short. We did it in a month, a month and a half, from writing it, to signing everybody, to executing contracts. It was a very scrunched timeline. And then on the editing side, it definitely took a little bit longer just because it is summer.
ICYMI: You're taking this big bet so what are you measuring to see if it worked?
Red: For us, everything we do on social and across our YouTube channels is engagement. We qualify and weigh our engagements to make sure that we're actually understanding the way people are engaging with it. Shares, obviously, are differently weighted than a like in the comments, views are also an incredibly important metric.
There's not one metric for everything, but engagement is the most important thing for us, because at the scale of YouTube, as a brand on social, to be ignored would be very hard. Engagement is what we’re going for. We are here to deepen fandom, to celebrate creators, not just to push a message across.
ICYMI: YouTube has previously said it wouldn't be involved in original content production. Is this part of a larger shift internally, or is this being driven by the social team?
Red: It's very social. This is not YouTube Originals or original programming in the sense of a scaled program to do this. This is us as a social team, as an editorial team, making sure that we are focusing on that engagement and that brand love.
ICYMI: You mentioned the term editorial. Can you give a little context for anybody that has never worked in an editorial capacity?
Red: The easiest way for me to put it is, YouTube is a brand that means a lot to a lot of people. We sit within a marketing organization, and we sit within the brand side of the marketing organization. What we do in editorial is very much to deepen brand love. What editorial means is that we are reflecting back out on our social platforms the culture of YouTube, mass culture and the ways that creators interact with their fans.
ICYMI: What do you think are the chances we’ll see more episodes of the game show?
Red: We keep calling it a game show. It's really a long-form improv show. So, we would want to build it the right way for creators to engage, not just go, “Hey, this worked one time. You have to do it exactly the same next time.” But to use that in quotes “game show,” we would love to do more of these, and we’d maybe switch out, not just the creators that are involved, but the games they play, the format that it ends up being, and maybe the place.
Kate: We've definitely been ideating for some fun, end of year shenanigans in the same vein.
ICYMI: We love shenanigans. Now, maybe I'm shoehorning this into a trend that I'm seeing but a lot of brands seem to be creating series, whether it's reality series, scripted series, whatever. I see the game show aligning with that. Have you guys also observed this and why do you think this is happening?
Kate: Yeah, it's definitely noticeable. And I think specifically office-based humor is coming back. And I know we've got The Office spin-off coming back, but the In Style [office series], that was amazing.
I mean, there's no better dream for a content marketer than to hit on a series that you can keep doing, because it's easy when you have a format. Finding that right balance and trying to find, “What's the 73 questions of YouTube?” I feel like every brand has been, like, “What's my 73 questions?” Trying to find a good series that can live on makes marketers’ lives easier.
ICYMI: What’s up next? What are you prioritizing as you plan for next year?
Red: We’re in the middle of it right now. For us, what is clearly rising is how to get into more closed spaces. Messaging. Discord. I think it's incredibly hard for all brands. We're all trying to figure it out, but it's not going anywhere. That's an insight we're seeing from Gen Z and Gen Alpha now is that they find a lot of comfort in the smaller spaces on digital and social platforms.
What is clearly rising is how to get into more closed spaces. Messaging. Discord... That's an insight we're seeing from Gen Z and Gen Alpha now is that they find a lot of comfort in the smaller spaces on digital and social platforms.
The other one would be this continued investment in multi-format. We think that's what makes YouTube differentiated in the marketplace, and for us, being able to flex content across multiple platforms and formats, being able to tell great stories, regardless of the limitations, whether it's text-only, all the way to long-form video, that is going to be even more important.
ICYMI: Let me ask a quick aside. Instagram has identified the five most shareable types of content on their platform. Does YouTube have anything similar? Do you guys have guidance on what makes shareable content?
Red: We have a proprietary special sauce within our editorial team of what we think makes shareable. We are obsessed with it. We have an entire strategy and innovation team that sits next to us that helps us think through this. I wouldn't say we have anything magic or anything that's easy to put down.
I think that what Instagram is doing to show transparency is really great. I think for us, it comes down to what I've laid out, is that we have these pillars in our content strategy that we need to hit around creator love, mass culture and a YouTube truth that really gets us to a place where you would want to share it.
But I can tell you this, and maybe this is a better answer, we don't make anything that we think is not for sharing. So everything we make is, “Would someone DM this to their friend? Comments. Likes. These are all fantastic, but share is that metric we see consistently across the board drive the most correlation to high engagement.
We don't make anything that we think is not for sharing. So everything we make is, “Would someone DM this to their friend? Comments. Likes. These are all fantastic, but share is that metric we see consistently across the board drive the most correlation to high engagement.
ICYMI: If you guys wanted to create a PDF, I'm sure the YouTube community, and all the marketers, would very much appreciate a nice little chart.
Red: What’s funny about us is that we're the social team at YouTube. So, we're actually obsessed with the other platforms. We think like every other marketer. So to your original question, sharing is that metric, that is the one we're all trying to do. It really comes down to the creative and the intent for each piece of content. Kate and I, that's what we obsess over. That's why there's so much partnership here, we look at everything we post through that lens.
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ICYMI: I love that you said that because it feeds into my next question. A lot of social marketers might see you and your team and assume that you have it easy. You put out a video. It goes to 48 million subscribers. You work with creators every day. And you have access to all the YouTube insights. Do you have challenges we might not realize?
Kate: Yes, those are advantages, and I don't want to downplay that we have those advantages, but, I will say, we still face the same hurdles. There's not unlimited budget. As much as I'd love to pay creators to just keep making original content, I would run out of money in a month. You know, budget is always going to be a problem.
And there can be difficulty honing in on exactly what is going to hit with our audience versus what is hitting with a non-platform audience, versus creators we want to spotlight. And we have such broad audiences that we don't know if the content is always going to land. So I think navigating the freedom of choice is also a little bit hard.
Red: I would say it's the classic one. It is incredibly hard to prove ROI and efficacy from social content. I don't know that there is a team out there that has proven that their engagements lead to X. I think there's a lot going on in CPG that we all look at, like, “Oh, I wish we had that in conversion.” We see a lot in pure entertainment brands being able to go “It's all in service of that entertainment.” I don't want anyone to pity us or feel bad for us, but we have the same problems as everyone else.
ICYMI: What would your advice be for a social media manager who wants to have fun, maybe test a game-show format, but doesn't have the budget or access to creators you do?
Red: Social as a corporate endeavor has been scrappy from the beginning. If you have a great idea, or something you want to try, build a coalition and find a way to make the best version you can with what you have, not only the version you dreamed up in the first draft. Bring in coworkers to be contestants, shoot on two phones on stands, script it with AI, and edit for the moments that make great short-form video. All good art needs constraints!
*This interview has been edited for length.
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what a cool read!! loved all of these insights & seeing what goes on to pull something like this off 😄🩵!!
Love this! Big fan of everything Kate & Red have been able to accomplish with YouTube social 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾