GO DESi's 54-Second Problem: Reach More People or Get More People to Stay?

The Challenge

For its Raksha Bandhan campaign, GO DESi brought its story closer to home. The video featured its co-founders, Vinay Kothari and his sister, Raksha Kothari, sharing how they work together as siblings to build GO DESi and make it the best it can be.

GO DESi wanted its 54-second film to tell the complete brand story. But long-form videos typically face a challenge: the longer the video, the harder it is to get people to watch it till the end.

Our campaign data showed a significant drop in VTR once video length crossed the 20-second mark. The question, therefore, wasn't simply how to get more impressions. It was:

Do we optimize for cheaper reach and impressions through CPM, or do we optimize for people who actually watch the entire video through CPV?

Since the objective was to make sure the brand story was seen in full, complete video views became the key KPI.

The Media Ant's Approach

Instead of shortening the film or optimizing purely for efficient impressions, we built the media strategy around completed views.

We recommended running the full 54-second film as a skippable YouTube CTV ad and optimizing the campaign towards people who would watch the video completely.

This meant optimizing for CPV and completion over simply chasing the lowest CPM. The media strategy was designed to give the full-length creative the right environment and bidding approach to deliver its entire story.

The Campaign

Platform: YouTube CTV
Format: Skippable video
Creative Length: 54 seconds
Primary KPI: Complete video views
Optimization: CPV-led, focused on full video completion
Strategic Trade-off: Complete views over cheaper CPM-led reach

The Result

The decision to optimize for completed views helped the campaign deliver strong engagement with the full-length creative.

Brand Lift: 200% higher than the benchmark
VTR: 2X the regular VTR

The campaign demonstrated that a longer creative does not necessarily have to be compromised when the media strategy is built around the right KPI.

What Made the Campaign Work?

The answer wasn't to make the video shorter or simply maximize impressions.

The strategy was to optimize for the people who actually watched the 54-second video in full.

By choosing complete views over cheaper CPM-led delivery and pairing the creative with the right CTV format and bidding strategy, GO DESi was able to preserve its full brand story while delivering a Brand Lift nearly twice the benchmark.

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