While Friends was a cultural sensation in the late 90s and early 00s, it’s been twelve years since it went off the air. That means there’s a whole generation of people who might not understand what all the fuss was about when Netflix recently acquired the rights to all ten seasons of the show.

That’s why it went straight to where those youngsters find most of their information today: YouTube.

For the series’ launch on Netflix in France, agency Ogilvy Paris said  it tagged thousands of YouTube’s top videos and search terms – from video games and dancing to makeup tutorials and cute cats – with relevant clips from the show’s 236 episodes to run as pre-roll ads. The agency also created new clips as the campaign went on that incorporated elements from the popular internet videos of the day, such as Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”

[iframe_youtube video = “K_3uKmLFHRI”]

While the campaign surely involved an impressive amount of work, the folks at Grey Canada might have reason to take issue to the case video’s claim that this is the first pre-roll campaign of its kind, since its “6 Billion Hours” campaign for Volvo last summer took a similar approach to serving pre-roll ads. For that campaign, it created spots that highlighted each of the new XC60’s features and connected them to relevant videos.

Credits:

Brand: Netflix
Agency: Ogilvy Paris
Directeur Général: Philip Heimann
Executive Creative Director: Baptiste Clinet
Creative Director: Nicolas Lautier
Creative Team: David Martinangelus (ACD), Erika Reyes & Mateo Fernandez (AD)
Business Director: Anne-Sophie Carbo
Account Supervisor: Nadia Lasfar
Head of Strategic Planning: Alexandra Mimoun
Strategic Planner: Amélie Delacour
Head of Integrated Production: Antoine Bagot
Production Company: Fighting Fish
Media agency: Google