YouTube Red × Fruit Ninja

The most powerful way to engage young audiences is to invite them into a story's world and give them the tools to create within it.

To launch Fruit Ninja: Frenzy Force on YouTube Red, we turned to Google's ecosystem of tools to bring young fans directly into the Fruit Ninja universe. Partnering with Toontastic 3D, we worked closely with product and engineering teams to build the show's characters, environments, and visual world directly into the app. Kids could then script, voice, and animate original stories inside an authentic extension of the franchise, transforming passive fans into active creators.

We extended the idea into the physical world through hands-on animation workshops, where kids used Google Pixel devices and Toontastic to create and upload their films to YouTube, sharing their Fruit Ninja stories with a global audience.

The campaign blurred the line between title marketing and creative mentorship, using technology and community to inspire a new generation of storytellers. It earned the 2018 Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Media, one of my proudest career achievements, and proved that the most meaningful marketing invites audiences to help create the story themselves.