Some of the world’s most recognizable CPG brands are rewriting the rules of social video, and they’re doing it with data-backed audience insights. From cross-platform strategy to post timing, every decision is informed by data, and every decision is deliberate.
Red Bull, Heineken, Charlotte Tilbury, and Old Spice each took a different path to social video success. But when taking a closer look at the data, the same pattern emerges: bold, unconventional decision-making backed by audience insights.
In this post, we’re unlocking the platform strategies, creator partnerships, and audience insights behind these CPG brands’ successful social video strategies.
What makes a successful CPG social video strategy?
A successful CPG social video strategy prioritizes data-driven insights over assumptions. Brands should select distribution platforms based on engagement metrics, source creator partnerships by cultural fit with their audiences, and use performance data to stay ahead of shifting audience behaviors and platform trends.
How Can Your CPG Brand Maximize Social Video Engagement?
To maximize social video engagement, CPG brands should not assume their highest-volume platform is their highest-impact one. When looking at Red Bull’s social video data, we see an opportunity to rethink where content investment delivers the greatest return.
Tubular data shows that 77% of global YouTube views in 2025 came from videos less than a minute long. Red Bull met this trend head on with a high volume short-form video strategy. When looking at their performance data, however, we see that short-form content doesn’t drive the same results on every platform:
YouTube: Red Bull’s YouTube engagement on both their short- and long-form videos aligned closely with their upload strategy.
TikTok: Despite accounting for just 14% of their cross-platform uploads, TikTok videos drove 63% of their total engagement.
Key takeaway: Video duration optimization and content performance vary from platform to platform. To excel across all of them, CPG brands need to understand their own metrics while accounting for nuances in audience preference on individual platforms.
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Red Bull’s social video strategy demonstrates that the highest-impact platform isn’t always the most obvious one, and social video data is the only way to know the difference. Another CPG beverage brand, Heineken, let social video data guide them to an unexpected creator partnership — a niche men’s fashion creator far outside their usual category and the results were nothing short of incredible.
How Can Your Campaign Best Leverage Niche Creator Partnerships?
CPG brands can best leverage niche creator partnerships by prioritizing cultural fit over category fit.
Heineken teamed up with men’s fashion creator @mikaelgama for a creator-brand partnership campaign that drove 168M views and 1M engagements in just 50 days, despite Mikael having an initial following of only 136K. With this success, he became the #1 most-viewed Brazilian influencer in the first half of 2025. Though this creator may not be a traditional beer or CPG brand partner, his cultural fit with the audience outperformed his category fit.
The unexpected pairing created immediate intrigue. Mikael’s visual aesthetic aligned naturally with Heineken’s premium image, and his audience trusts his taste implicitly. As a result, his endorsement of the brand resonated far beyond what his 136K following would suggest was possible.
Key takeaway: The creator economy rewards brands that think beyond category fit and vanity metrics. That’s because predicting ROI based solely on follower count, views, and engagements leaves a lot of room for error. Instead, CPG brands should layer in factors like search affinity, shopping affinity, and audience overlap for a more accurate prediction of social video campaign success.
Learn how audience intelligence identifies the right creator partners for your brand. Download Redefining Influencer Value: How Audience Intelligence Transforms Reach into Revenue.
Heineken proved that going outside your category can unlock audiences you didn’t know you had. Makeup brand Charlotte Tilbury took a similar approach to their brand partnership strategy by teaming up with a partner who’s outside of their category and quite unexpected at first glance.
How Can Strategic Brand Partnerships Expand Audience Reach?
When figuring out how to expand audience reach through strategic brand partnerships, brands can look at Charlotte Tilbury’s partnership with Formula 1’s F1 Academy. This unexpected pairing offers the campaign blueprint for targeting unexpected consumer segments.
Charlotte Tilbury was the first female-founded Beauty brand to partner with Formula 1’s F1 Academy. The partnership placed a bold bet on audience overlap between Beauty and Motorsports, and the payoff was immediate and measurable:
- More views and engagements: TikTok UGC tied to the partnership drove 9.6M views and 852K engagements from 2024 to 2025.
- Audience overlap growth: Among UK Beauty viewers (women 18–34), overlap with Formula 1 content grew +97% and Lewis Hamilton content grew +117% YoY.
- Rising female viewership: Formula 1’s Facebook audience saw a 2 percentage point increase in female viewers YoY.
Key takeaway: Unexpected collaborations measurably expand your audience into new consumer segments. CPG brands should leverage overlap insights to make informed partnership decisions, then monitor audience expansion to measure impact.
Uncover the hidden audience overlaps your brand hasn’t tapped into yet. Download Unexpected Partnerships: Unlocking New Opportunities.
Charlotte Tilbury’s use of audience overlap data led to a massive uptick in TikTok UGC and mutual audience growth with F1 Academy. Old Spice took the same data-driven mindset to YouTube and achieved results that are equally impressive.
How to Scale Audience Reach Without Flooding the Platform
Scaling audience reach isn’t necessarily about producing more content. It’s about strategic and targeted publishing. Old Spice’s YouTube strategy shows exactly how CPG brands can grow viewership and expand into new consumer segments without solely increasing upload frequency.
Old Spice is one of YouTube’s largest CPG brands by views and global reach. Perhaps more impressively, that standing wasn’t built solely on video upload volume. Rather than flooding the platform with content, Old Spice focused on posting more strategically, ensuring that each upload was purposeful, targeted, and built to perform.
When we break down the results, the strategy behind the growth becomes clear:
- 5x growth in unique viewers: This growth was driven by a major ad push with YouTube Shorts, strategic creator partnerships, and localized content.
- Expanded audience reach: A new emphasis on its women’s product line allowed Old Spice to grow its target audience on both YouTube and traditional TV.
Key takeaway: Upload frequency alone won’t grow your audience. Old Spice’s results show that a combination of leveraging high-impact formats like YouTube Shorts, purposeful creator brand partnerships, and focusing on expanding into adjacent audience demographics can drive greater reach.
See how other leading CPG brands are moving the needle in social video. Download the CPG Social Video Playbook: 3 Insights Driving Growth Right Now.
So far, we’ve discussed how leading CPG brands have each cracked a different piece of the social video puzzle. While no social video strategy is one-size-fits-all, there are foundational levers that every CPG brand can pull to stay ahead.
Key Takeaways: What Separates a Good CPG Social Video Strategy from a Great One?
A good CPG social video strategy follows best practices. A great one uses audience data to question them, and the brands mentioned above show exactly what that looks like in practice. Here are some of the biggest takeaways to apply to your campaign strategy:
- Know where your audience actually engages: Upload frequency means nothing if your content is concentrated on the wrong platforms. Track engagement rate by platform and invest accordingly.
- Challenge your assumptions about creator fit: The most impactful creator partnerships come from looking beyond vanity metrics like follower count. When choosing a brand partner, dig deeper into search affinity, shopping affinity, and audience overlap data to inform your decisions.
- Use data to validate bold moves: In-depth data enables you to understand the hidden passions of your audience to make bold decisions. Then, measure the effectiveness of your campaigns by monitoring overlapping audience expansion.
Social video moves fast. The CPG brands that stay ahead are the ones that let data lead the way.
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