Notion: 5M+ views from an audience it had never spoken to.

The approach

Notion wanted a new audience, not more reach inside the one it already owned. We picked chess: a community with enormous attention on YouTube and almost no presence from productivity software. A creator explaining a note-taking app to chess players is an advert. A creator showing a tool that solves something they already do by hand is a recommendation.

So we built the use cases before we wrote the brief: opening repertoire statistics, a tracker for your last games, and a rating log for reviewing your own play. Those went into a custom briefing, and the campaign launched with GothamChess, the largest chess channel on YouTube.

The results

The campaign passed 5M views and drove 60,000 clicks to Notion, from a community the brand had no prior foothold in. Building the use case before the brief is now how we open any category where the product has no natural place in the conversation yet.