YouTube Lets Brands Make Thousands of Videos From One Ad

YouTube plans to introduce a slew of products Monday that attempt to help with ad targeting, measuring success and making hundreds or thousands of different creative exectutions from one source of video. The company, part of Google, says it's expanding its Custom Affinity Audience offering so advertisers can target users who search for ski resorts on Google Maps or download a ski resort app, for example, and serve them with ads for winter-related gear. It also provides targeting based on real-life locations that users may have visited. Previously, advertisers were able to target users based on searches they performed on YouTube. "It's the layering of intent or intention on top of demographics that makes this powerful," says Tara Walpert Levy, VP of agency and media solutions at Google. "Maybe it's a Gen X woman, a millennial or an older man—who the heck knows—but the fact you know they have a passion for skiing means it's much more likely that you're connecting with them something they care about." Meanwhile, YouTube says its new Director Mix software can create hundreds or thousands of different video from a single asset. Campbell's Soup, for example, ran ads on YouTube clips from Netflix's "Orange is the New Black" with the tagline, "Does your cooking make prison food seem good?" Campbell's showed people who watched Beyonce's "Single Ladies" music video a similar spot, but with the line, "Dinner for one?" Examples like that apply to most popular YouTube videos that are also popular with a brand's audience, according to Levy, who says videos featuring more obscure content (like, say, the battle music from Final Fantasy 7 for the Playstation) are likely to show a brand's generic spot. Marketers who leverage Director Mix must provide YouTube with all the building blocks of video, including voiceovers, background and copy. YouTube says it will then create "hundreds or thousands of versions to match your audience segments." The company is also debuting Video Ad Sequencing, which will allow marketers to string together a variety of different ad types should they chose. For example, advertisers can show a 15-second TrueView ad (which are the skippable type) to build awareness, followed at the next opportunity by longer spots (because that's what consumers want, right?) to further the brand story and later a 6-second bumper ad to drive purchase. Meanwhile, it also says it's also implementing Nielsen's Matched Panel Analysis so marketers can measure across all their online media, not just across video or Google.

YouTube Lets Brands Make Thousands of Videos From One Ad

Featured Stories