“…In line with the main aim specified, this study examined one hundred YouTube video ads, which were listed on monthly basis as the most watched and creative advertisements in Turkey on YouTube Ads Leaderboard lists by Google, since it was also considered that it would be beneficial for the current and future professionals as well as the academics to deduce from the sample what creative message strategies were utilized in video commercials which were most watched and found creative during such a crisis, and this study asked four questions as follows: In order to find answers to the research questions above, this study content-analyzes these YouTube video ads through the help of MAXQDA data analysis program within the theoretical framework of Taylor's Six-Segment Message Strategy Wheel, which has been proved in the literature to help researchers discover the message strategies embedded in many types of advertisements, including print ads (Chen & Taylor, 2012;Lee, Taylor, & Chung, 2011;Nowakowski & Nowakowska, 2016;James, 2011;Beane, 2013;Ziemba, 2013), TV commercials (Uluğ Yurttaş & Özkoçak, 2020;Tsai & Lancaster, 2013;Morrison & White, 2000;Ju & Park, 2015;Park, Shoieb, & Taylor, 2017), viral ads (Golan & Zaidner, 2008), public service ads (PSAs) (Lancaster, 2010), social media contents (Ashley & Hediye Aydoğan COVID-19 Pandemisinde YouTube Ads Leaderboard'da ... Tuten, 2015;Aktaş & Şener, 2019;Zengin & Zengin, 2020;Daniel Jr., Crawford Jackson, & Westerman, 2018;Jenkins, 2018), social media ads (Shin & Lee, 2015;Yfantidou, Riskos, & Tsourvakas, 2017), and also PSAs and TV commercials during COVID-19 pandemic worldwide (excluding Turkey) (Deng, Ekachai, & Pokrywczynski, 2020). The ads were scrutinized based on message strategies which were divided into three main categories, depending on Taylor's model, which were transformational (ego, social, and sensory), informational (ration, acute needs, and routine), and combined message strategy, and analyzed through frequency analysis, cross-tabs (document group comparison) and MAXMaps code-occurrence model.…”