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Using YouTube’s Creative Suite for Great Storytelling

YouTube’s creative suite offers powerful tools to brands and video advertising companies to re-conceptualize their approach to video.

YouTube’s creative suite includes a set of tools that marketers can use to tell great stories to their audiences on YouTube, test variations of video creatives, and assess the impact that their creatives make.

The following tools are included in the creative suite, viz. – video experiments, video creative analytics, director mix and video ad sequencing.

Testing a creative is not an easy job. It can involve a lot of time and cost. Moreover, it does not always suggest real-world performance. Video experiments tool overcomes these problems. Video experiments tool is a feature in the creative suite that does head to head testing. It works along with the brand lift metric and enables a YouTube advertising agency to evaluate the impact that a creative makes on the key metrics such as consumers’ purchase intent, awareness, etc.

Results can be obtained in just 3 days and without any extra expenditure when cleanly segmented experiments are conducted. The non-working media spend, which is utilized in simulated environments, is transformed by YouTube’s video experiments tool into working media spend. YouTube users only view what they want to view, thus making it a highly trustworthy testing platform for marketers.

Developing reports on creative performance is a cumbersome process. The video creative analytics tool simplifies this process. It provides quantitative creative insights to marketers. By including segmentation in the audience retention reports, it provides insights to marketers on how their creatives are grabbing the attention of distinct audience segments. Marketers can know how many people viewed key moments present within a video such as product shots. This makes marketers understand the effects of different creative elements on the performance a YouTube video campaign. By utilizing these insights, a brand along with its partner video advertising company can develop better future creatives.

Director Mix tool makes it very easy to develop multiple versions of a single base video. It allows swapping out elements in order to customize content for specific audiences. It helps deliver the right version of the video to the right audience. Thus, Director Mix helps brands leverage the power of personalization.

Telling stories to audiences that fetch their attention is really difficult, especially when this has to be done at scale. Video ad sequencing tool allows YouTube marketing companies to make storytelling on YouTube highly effective. With video ad sequencing, a story of a brand or its product is revealed over a series of video ads in a defined order. Telling a brand story in a sequence enables marketers to achieve huge awareness and engagement. Video ad sequencing has been used by movie production houses to give their audiences a story-driven introduction to a new movie.

YouTube’s creative suite enables creation of attention-grabbing and impactful video ads that help drive brand awareness, engagement, and sales.

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How to Effectively Reach the Desired Audience on YouTube

When it comes to choosing an online video hosting platform for video advertising, the first choice of marketers is always YouTube. The reasons behind this choice are twofold – the vast audience of YouTube and the varied targeting options that YouTube offers.

Marketers can reach their desired audience on YouTube by using a YouTube ad targeting option known as custom audiences. This option involves the use of web addresses, relevant keywords, and apps.

In order to create custom audiences for YouTube campaigns, or for other campaigns such as display, discovery, etc., marketers need to add specific URLs, product-related keywords and apps. Google Ads will display ads to consumers having these interests or buying intentions against content on YouTube, apps and pages.

Before Google introduced the custom audiences’ option, marketers used to make a choice between custom intent audiences or custom affinity audiences. As custom audiences’ option is now available, making this choice is not required. By taking into account the goals and keywords of a YouTube video campaign, the custom audiences feature understands all the signals in order to make account management efficient. If in case, custom intent audiences or custom affinity audiences have been already created, they will get automatically migrated to the new custom audiences.

By using custom audiences, the work of a YouTube advertising agency becomes easier as this targeting option automatically selects the best audience for a campaign. After considering the bidding strategy and video ad campaign’s goals, the system selects an audience focused on one of these three parameters – performance, consideration, or reach.

For instance, if a car manufacturing company wants to specifically target the audience interested in sport utility vehicles instead of the generic car affinity audience, it can leverage custom audiences. The car manufacturing company can make use of relevant keywords, web addresses and apps in order to build the specific audience. Keywords like sports car can be used, uniform resource locators of websites featuring content about sport utility vehicles can be entered, and apps that a person interested in sport utility vehicles would prefer can be added.

For a video advertising company, setting up custom audiences is quite easy. A custom audience can be set up by going to audience manager under the shared library in a Google Ads account, or from within a campaign. After entering the name for the audience, there are shown two options to select from - people possessing particular interests or buying intentions, and people searching for particular terms. The first option is the default one and requires adding keywords describing people’s interests or products they are researching for purchasing. If the second option is selected, then the terms that people are using to search on YouTube and Google are to be entered.

By leveraging custom audiences’ option, marketers can easily target their desired audience, and boost conversions and sales.

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Generating High Impact Through Audience-tailored Video Ads

Audience insights related to interests and intent are extremely valuable to the creative development process. Deeper audience insights lead to highly effective video storytelling.

Research shows that a video creative that leverages deeper audience insights can cast a powerful impact. By making little personalization tweaks according to audience insights, brands and their partner video advertising companies can make a huge difference.

The process of creating tailored video assets for different types of audiences on YouTube requires a lot of resources in terms of cost and time. But this process can be made efficient. For example, instead of creating a distinct campaign idea for each of the audience types, a single core idea for the campaign can be developed, and then, small tweaks to this idea can be made to produce new ideas for different types of audiences. Tweaks that can be made include using different screen characters, specific CTAs, tailored text overlays, etc.

Making small adjustments to a video creative does not need a big increase in production, but leads to creation of videos that are personalized for every type of audience. This personalized approach helps in achieving YouTube video campaign goals effectively and efficiently.

A video creative based on a strong concept can resonate with a broader audience, beyond the targeted niche audience. Thus, it can stimulate interest in non-niche audiences also and drive significant engagement. For example, a video ad agency can target different audiences, viz. – those who are environmentally conscious and those who are sports fans - for its awareness campaign regarding ending hunger by slightly tweaking the video ad according to each audience type.

The people who are environmentally conscious draw their motivation from community. Therefore, for them, a CTA having the text - Join us, can be used as it will encourage them to become a part of the awareness movement. The people who are sports fans draw their motivation from personal pride. Therefore, a CTA posing a challenge such as – donate to keep your country fed, can be used for them. These two versions of the video ad, because of their strong creative concepts, have the potential to resonate across a broader audience, beyond the niche segments.

By acquiring a deep understanding of what interests and stimulates an audience, a video advertising company can create meaningful and highly effective video campaign concepts. It can get novel creative ideas by taking its thinking beyond the demographic data of audiences to signals such as different passions of different audiences. Based on audience insights for different types of audiences, different video creatives can be created for different audience types in order to drive high engagement.

By considering deeper audience insights, brands can move beyond one video ad fits all approach and create highly effective, customized video creatives.

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Optimizing Video Advertising Campaigns to Better Achieve Marketing Goals

As consumer behavior tends to change with time and new business challenges keep on appearing, it is important for marketers to adapt their advertising campaigns accordingly.

Most of the time, tweaks to media mix, video creative, or audience targeting strategy, can help marketers adapt to change and increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.

By making sure that video mix is well aligned with the objectives, brands and their partner video advertising companies can improve their return on investment. YouTube offers a fast and effective tool known as video experiments to help marketers in this case. This tool enables them to run a head to head comparison of the performance of different versions of a video creative. It also provides insight to marketers on the performance of different versions of creative when they are run as part of different types of ad formats.

When stay-at-home orders were passed during the early phase of the pandemic, consumer electronics brands saw an increase in demand for their products. Laptop sales witnessed a steep increase. Google Trends showed an increase in search queries for topics like starting a podcast. Consumer electronics brands saw this as a great opportunity to sell at-home products during the lockdown. One of the brands decided to reiterate its dedication to consumer service in a manner which genuinely mirrored its business. It decided to communicate its values and expertise.

To do so, it created a YouTube video campaign that featured its employees assisting customers in resolution of problems and helping them make product buying decisions, while themselves working from their own homes. This brand used video experiments in order to know which ad formats give best results. Although the brand got a positive return on ad spend across different ad formats that it tested, the highest return was achieved from the TrueView for action format, which included CTAs. The brand achieved significant increase in awareness and ad recall.

For successful video campaigns, marketers need to reach the right people. By using the contextual video advertising technology, marketers can show ads that are contextually relevant to the video content the consumers are watching. As a contextually relevant ad resonates with what a viewer is currently interested in, there are high chances of viewer’s engagement with such an ad. Just by clicking a relevant ad, user can directly reach the advertised product’s landing page in order to gain more information about the product and make a purchase.  

Another campaign optimization technique to consider involves making simple adjustments to a video creative. Little tweaks such as using a strong call to action or a text overlay can cast a significantly positive impact on the performance of a video campaign.

From the above, it is quite clear that by finding and using the most effective ad format, using contextual ad targeting, and making tweaks to video creative, marketers can better achieve their goals.

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Increasing Efficiency by Using Bulk Management Tools for YouTube Campaigns

To help manage video campaigns and ads in bulk, Google offers various bulk management tools. By using these tools, a video ad agency can more efficiently build, manage, and get reports on its YouTube campaigns in bulk.

Some of the bulk management tools are described here. Hundreds of video campaigns can be built and edited at once with the help of the bulk uploads tool. Thus, marketers do not have to build and edit a single campaign at a time. To use this tool, first of all, one has to download a spreadsheet that has all the elements belonging to the campaigns, ads, or ad groups. After this, the elements can be edited, added or removed in bulk. Once the changes have been made, the updated spreadsheet is again uploaded and the changes are reflected in the account.

The bulk in-line editing tool enables a video advertising company to make large-scale alterations to campaigns, ads, and ad groups. This feature can be accessed by using a drop-down menu known as Edit. The Edit menu is available on the campaigns, ads and ad groups pages. By using this menu, one can make changes to many elements at the same time. Bulk in-line editing tool is a very beneficial tool as it saves a lot of precious time of marketers by allowing them to update at the same time multiple items in a single YouTube video campaign or across many campaigns. By using a menu option known as recent bulk edits, one can look at the edits that have been made recently to the account, i.e., the edits made in the past ninety days.

Automated rules tool helps marketers save time by decreasing the need to check campaigns and make alterations often and manually. By making use of the automated rules, marketers can automate alterations to the account, based on their specified criteria, such as status, bids, etc. For instance, one can schedule ads to get displayed at particular times during a day. Similarly, one can use automated rules to adjust bids in accordance with time, season, etc.

Manager account reporting tool allows running a performance report across all the managed accounts. To use this tool, one has to go to an option present in the manager account with the name Reports. Using this option, different performance reports can be created, downloaded and managed. One can also apply campaign type filter to get relevant data.  

With Google Ads editor tool, video advertising companies can not only create and manage YouTube campaigns, but also make changes to campaign settings. Google Ads scripts tool allows automating actions by making use of the JavaScript code. For example, one can use this tool to pause ad groups.

The use of the above-mentioned tools can help marketers in efficiently managing video campaigns and ads in bulk on YouTube.

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Increased YouTube Viewing on TV Screen Offers Tremendous Opportunity to Marketers

The coronavirus pandemic has made people stay inside their homes most of the time. This has led to increase in the consumption of online content, especially online videos.

Although Google Search revenue dropped in the second quarter of this year, YouTube Q2 Ad revenue witnessed a good hike. This boost for YouTube came from the increased viewing of YouTube on TV screens. This also shows that YouTube ad targeting companies are actively serving ads on YouTube.  

According to a report released by Conviva, in the second quarter of 2020, there was a twelve percent increase in ad impressions delivered on connected TVs, while on desktop and mobile, there was a drop of twelve percent. Connected TV devices recorded a growth of sixty-one percent year over year to maintain nearly fifty percent share of global viewing time in the second quarter.

The smart TV category saw a whopping two-hundred and thirty-nine percent increase in viewing time. This significant increase raised global share of viewing through smart TVs to greater than the double, from seven percent in the second quarter of 2019 to fifteen percent in the second quarter of 2020.

It is intuitive that most of the YouTube viewing occurs on the mobile devices. Google even has stated that seventy-five percent of adults in the United States, use mobile devices to watch videos on YouTube in their homes. The recent data revealed an amazing finding. Among the five hundred YouTube accounts involving brands, entertainment, media organizations, and sports, fifty-nine percent of YouTube viewing took place on a mobile device in the second quarter of 2020. This percentage reveals a significant fall from the sixty-seven percent share of mobile devices in the second quarter of 2019.

As with all other video streaming services, people are increasingly preferring watching YouTube on their TV screens. TV screens provide a high-quality and more engaging viewing experience to people. The share of viewing YouTube on connected TVs and consoles has witnessed an impressive increase of sixty-nine percent - it grew from sixteen percent to twenty-seven percent. Television screens now account for over twenty-five percent of all viewing time on YouTube. This is an important finding for YouTube marketing companies.

According to Google, over one hundred million people view YouTube or YouTube TV on TV screens. Recently uploaded content on YouTube is consumed more often in comparison to other content. This is evident from the finding that sixty percent of users who signed into YouTube on a TV screen viewed a recently uploaded video, i.e., a video published in the past seven days.

Thus, video is moving back to the TV screens, and TV is once again becoming the main entertainment source inside a home. Watching YouTube on TV is a major factor that has led to the above trend.

Increased viewing of YouTube on TV screens offers a tremendous opportunity to brands and video advertising companies to leverage YouTube advertising in order to boost brand awareness and sales.    

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Boosting ROI on Sports Advertising Through TV Ad Sync

Big sporting events offer a huge opportunity for brands to advertise their products and services to a massive audience that watches these events on TV.  

The coronavirus pandemic put a halt on the live sporting events, but now the professional sports have started returning and are setting up TV viewership records. In the month of June this year, new TV viewership records were set by the Golf channel when it broadcasted the Charles Schwab Challenge, which is a professional golf tournament played every year in Texas. Overall, the four days TV viewership for this golf tournament was more than seventy-eight percent this year in comparison to the viewership in 2019.

In the same month, LaLiga, which is one of the top European football leagues, witnessed its increase in the global viewership of more than forty-eight percent on the 1st match day of the soccer league’s restart. According to Nielsen Sports, matches that were played during the period between 11 and 14 June, witnessed TV viewership growth across the world including Asian countries. There was a fifty-six percent increase in TV viewership across Europe – a forty-six percent increase in Denmark, twelve percent in Spain, and an impressive one hundred and thirty percent in Belgium. In South Africa, there was a whopping two hundred and ten percent increase in TV viewership.

It is clear from the above data that sporting events are setting up new TV viewership records by satisfying a massive sport-starved audience. Huge TV viewership of live, professional sports content implies tremendous opportunities for marketers. But the landscape for marketers is changing. There is increased competition for ad inventories, and customer preferences and buying habits have evolved in comparison to pre-pandemic times.

But apart from these above-mentioned obstacles, there is a major problem that is reducing the return on investment on TV advertising for brands. It is the cross-screen behavior of consumers, which means that while watching TV, people tend to gaze into their mobile devices, especially when TV commercials are running. This second-screen behavior increases the chances of people not watching TV commercials, leading to wasting of ads for marketers.

TV ad sync provides the remedy to this serious problem. It is a cross-platform advertising technology, also known as second-screen advertising technology, and involves simultaneously showing the same or similar ads on the TV screens and smartphones of consumers. For showing ads on mobile phones, this technology utilizes social media apps. With this second-screen marketing technology, relevant communications from brands can also be delivered on mobile devices right at the time when an important moment takes place in a game, for example, a catch in a cricket game.

TV sync advertising technology can be used by a brand to sync its own ads on TV and smartphone or sync a competitor’s ad on television with its own ad on mobile devices. The former is called self-sync, while the latter is known as competition sync.  

TV ad sync technology enables brands to effectively capitalize on the full advertising potential that professional sports offer and get maximum return on investment.

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How to Make Video Advertising Campaigns More Effective?

The majority of marketers are using video advertising as a marketing tool. This is because people prefer to watch videos over reading content.

But there are still few marketers thar are refraining from using this powerful tool. The reason they cite usually points to a past unsuccessful video advertising campaign. There can be many reasons that can result in the failure of a video ad campaign ranging from poor planning to non-engaging creative. This article provides some best practices that marketers and video advertising companies can follow to make their video advertising campaigns more effective.

Before starting to build a video advertising campaign, marketers should ask a question to themselves – What is the specific goal that this campaign intends to serve? After getting the answer to this question, the campaign should be created accordingly. Video ad campaigns can accomplish different goals such as creating brand awareness, increasing sales, promoting a new product, etc. When a video ad agency runs a campaign with a clear and pre-defined goal, the chances of getting success are increased.

Marketers should build their video campaigns by keeping in mind the audiences they want to target. Huge video hosting platforms such as YouTube provide marketers a variety of targeting options so that they can effectively target their desired audiences. By choosing the right YouTube ad targeting options, marketers can run successful YouTube campaigns. Taking into account the desired audience before creating a campaign helps in delivering a personalized ad experience to consumers.  

Video creative is one of the critical factors on which the success or failure of a video campaign depends. It is very important to choose the right tone for the creative. The selected tone should be fully in line with the message that the campaign wants to deliver. If this is not the case, the impact on viewers will be reduced. Some examples of tones include dramatic, instructional, funny, etc.

Using the right ad format can help boost the effectiveness of a video advertising campaign. There are many ad formats available on YouTube that YouTube marketing companies can make use of. Examples of ad formats available on YouTube include six seconds bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, masthead ads, etc. Unskippable in-stream ad format is considered good for building brand awareness.

A video creative should be able to capture the attention of viewers in the first few seconds. If viewers do not find the ad engaging, they will skip or ignore it. Marketers should also not forget to include a call to action (CTA). A clickable call to action is very beneficial as it takes a viewer directly to a product’s landing page, and thus facilitates buying.

By making use of the above-mentioned best practices, marketers and video advertising companies can make their video advertising campaigns more effective and better achieve their advertising objectives.    

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Using TrueView Ads to Run Effective YouTube Campaigns

One of the most effective ad formats that is increasingly being utilized by YouTube marketing companies is the TrueView ad format. The TrueView ad format has been built by Google on the promise that a marketer will pay for the video ad only when a viewer chooses to watch it.

By using TrueView ads, marketers are able to connect with the viewers that are curious to watch their brands' video ads, and thus are interested in the products and services offered by these brands. Following types of TrueView ads help marketers to run effective campaigns on YouTube -

TrueView In-Stream Ads

A TrueView in-stream video ad plays before or during a video, a user is watching. Marketers only pay for a TrueView in-stream ad when the ad is watched for at least thirty seconds or till the end (whichever duration is shorter), or when viewer engages with the ad by clicking on some element of the creative. Viewers cannot skip this ad for the first five seconds, after that they can if they want. Video advertising companies consider this ad type good for running brand awareness campaigns meant to achieve top of the funnel goals.

TrueView for Reach

TrueView for reach ads offer a combination of skippable in-stream format and cost-per-impression (CPM) buying. This ad type enables marketers to buy TrueView in-stream on a CPM basis. Therefore, it helps marketers to reach their targeted audience in a more efficient way. TrueView for reach ads are considered great for running YouTube campaigns with reach and awareness objectives. TrueView for reach campaigns also provide noteworthy increase in ad recall.

TrueView for Action

TrueView for action campaigns enables marketers to add the following to their ads - highly notable calls-to-action overlays, end screens, and headline text overlays. This helps in driving leads and conversions. By running TrueView for action campaigns, marketers can effectively accomplish tasks such as encouraging YouTube viewers to explore the products or services that they are promoting, providing contact information to viewers, etc.

TrueView Video Discovery

As the name suggests, a viewer discover these ads while browsing YouTube. TrueView video discovery ads are shown on search results and watch pages. The ad unit is made up of a thumbnail and maximum three lines of text. By clicking the ad, a viewer goes to the watch or channel page for viewing it. Video does not play inside the ad unit itself. Marketers consider this ad type good for achieving middle of the funnel objectives.

TrueView ads are beneficial for both YouTube viewers and marketers looking for effective YouTube ad targeting. Viewers watch the video ads that they are interested in, whereas marketers are able to target the right audience at the right price. Moreover, video ad length is not an issue with TrueView ads, marketers can take their time to tell their story in the best possible manner.

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Best Practices for Effective YouTube Targeting

YouTube is the most popular video hosting website in the world with most extensive catalog of online videos. The number of monthly logged-in users on YouTube is about 2 billion. YouTube offers tremendous opportunities to advertisers.

YouTube provides a wide range of ad formats and varied targeting options to marketers, enabling them to effectively and easily reach their target audience. It is important for marketers to use the right YouTube targeting options in order to drive success to their YouTube advertising campaigns. Using basic keyword and topic targeting at the start may not result in success. Below are discussed some handpicked ways that you as a marketer can use for effective targeting on YouTube -

Custom Intent Audiences

This targeting option helps marketers in reaching new customers on YouTube on the basis of the keywords used by the users to search for products and services on Google.com. It is not necessary that these audiences have any previous interaction with your brand. These are built from users who have recently searched the keywords that were used by you for to creating your audience.

Some of the great custom intent audiences that you can test out for your video advertising campaigns on YouTube are -

·       Converting search queries - You can use your list of converting queries from your search campaigns to display video ads to users who have searched for these queries.

·       Converting keywords – These keywords are not the same as converting search queries. You can create a different audience based on these.

·       Competitor terms - These allow you to show your video ads to users that are actively searching for your competitors.  

·       Best-selling products - You can create an audience from your best-selling products. You can easily find these products from the sales report of your e-commerce platform.  

Life Events

Life Events can prove to be a great targeting option. It allows you to show ads to customers during life milestones such as starting a business, graduating from college, changing or starting a job, getting married, purchasing a house, retiring from job, etc.

These life events provide a great opportunity to brands, which offer products or services needed in these moments, to emotionally connect with consumers. For effective targeting via life events, your video creative should clearly show consumers how your brand can help them go through these milestones smoothly.

Customer Match

Customer match allows marketers to target audiences by making use of the first-party online and offline data, i.e. the information shared by the customers. It enables marketers to target ads to their customers and to new audiences similar to them.

Ad Pods

YouTube's ad pod delivery method shows two ads back to back, i.e. one ad right after the other. Combining two ads in an ad pod, instead of showing them separately, provides an ad experience similar to the TV ads. Ad pods result in fewer ad break interruptions, which in turn increases the rates of both content and ad viewing.

TrueView Discovery Ads

TrueView discovery ads appear on the search results and watch pages on YouTube. YouTube is a huge search engine, next only to Google.com. It allows users to conduct search for specific videos that they are interested in. TrueView discovery ads campaign is unique as a video advertising campaign as it is the only one in Google Ads that allows marketers to target just the YouTube's search results page.

Combining keyword targeting with TrueView discovery campaigns offers a great way to capitalize on user intent. By running TrueView discovery ad campaigns, marketers can take over the top spot of the search results page on YouTube.

Video Ad Sequencing

Video ad sequencing enables marketers to use a series of video ads in a customized order to state their product or brand story to consumers. This YouTube marketing tool helps in building consumers' interest in the brand and its products or services.

Custom Affinity Audiences

This targeting method allows marketers to build audiences that are specifically interested in the products their brands make rather than the broad product categories. For example, if your brand makes running shoes, then you can specifically reach runners instead of those generally interested in sports.

In-Market Audiences

By using this targeting option, marketers can target audiences that are actively researching, comparing, and considering purchasing products or services that their brands offer.

Director Mix

Director Mix is a great video advertising tool offered by Google that allows easy creation of multiple versions of a video at scale. Thus, marketers can easily customize video ads for different audiences, languages and locations. This tool allows easy swapping out of elements such as sound, images and text in order to deliver video ads tailored to specific audiences. Even the creative can be fully changed without any loss of quality.  

Real-Time Triggers

By using real-time triggers, marketers can time their YouTube ads to align with significant moments associated with specific events such as a goal in a football match. This feature allows marketers to capitalize on consumers' cross-screen behavior.

Similar Audiences

This YouTube targeting feature helps marketers by automatically finding new audiences similar to those already existing in their remarketing lists. In order to find the like-minded audiences, Google makes use of a machine learning algorithm.

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Protecting brand reputation with AI

We just learned something quite distressing – that one in 10 videos out in the online jungle we call the internet – can contain something potentially ‘harmful’ and ‘damaging’.

What we mean by this is that some videos contain certain elements that may not be accurately reflected by the title or tags associated with it. This poses a problem for brands who may not want to be associated with adult themes or extreme violence.

To find out what this means for brands and what options they have, we spoke to Kartik Mehta, Chief Revenue Officer, SilverPush. With their new product Mirrors Safe, the brand offers an AI-Powered context-relevant brand suitability platform to help prevent unwanted associations.

In order to build this product and understand they extent of the issue, Silverpush reviewed 15 million videos across the largest video hosting and sharing platforms in the SEA region using Mirrors Safe. With one in 10 or 10% containing images or negative associations (according to Silverpush criteria), there is definitely a need for a solution.

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What's New in YouTube Advertising for Marketers?

Marketers are well aware of the advantages afforded by YouTube advertising. YouTube ads help in generating and spreading brand awareness, and in increasing sales. 

From time to time, YouTube updates its platform by adding new features. Adopting these new features into video advertising campaigns on YouTube can help marketers in connecting with users more meaningfully and effectively, and in boosting performance of their campaigns. 

Below are discussed some of the new features incorporated into the YouTube advertising platform -   

Direct Response Shoppable Ad Format 

In June 2020, YouTube announced a new ad format known as the direct response ad format. This new format will help brands by making video ads on YouTube video more shoppable. This new format adds browsable images of products beneath the video ad. This helps in driving traffic directly to the product pages. This new format comes at a time when people are increasingly shopping through e-commerce platforms to avoid chances of getting infected by shopping through physical stores. 

Video Action Campaigns 

YouTube also announced video action campaigns in June 2020. This feature offers a cost-effective and easy way to marketers to increase the number of conversions. It works by showing video ads that drive action automatically to the following - home feed, watch pages, and Google video partners. All of this happens within one single campaign. Any future inventory that becomes available will be included by YouTube. This new feature will help marketers in saving their precious time for focusing on important tasks such as building the right creative. 

Video Reach Campaigns 

Video reach campaigns provide an easy and efficient way to marketers for achieving their video advertising goals on YouTube. With this feature, marketers are able to upload multiple video creatives into just a single advertising campaign. It saves them from managing separate campaigns for different types of ads such as bumper ads and skippable / non-skippable in-stream ads. A machine learning (ML) algorithm, developed by Google, automatically displays the most efficient combo of the video ad formats in order to help marketers reach their audiences at scale. 

YouTube Masthead 

YouTube Masthead allows marketers to showcase brands, or their products or services, in the YouTube Home feed. The ad gets displayed across all devices. YouTube Masthead offers a highly effective solution for driving massive reach and allows marketers to plan their buys in advance without depending on auction. As this ad is placed on the YouTube's home page, it provides an extreme opportunity to marketers to show off their brands. 

Instant Review / Instant Reserve 

YouTube's Instant Review tool allows marketers to reserve ad space for up to one hundred and twenty days in advance. This happens through an automated process and does not require any minimum spend. By using this tool, marketers can book campaigns in advance with a defined budget. Using this tool to reserve ad campaigns in advance is similar to scheduling ads on TV, enabling marketers to secure spots beforehand for future important events. 

Augmented Reality (AR) Try-On Ads 

Augmented Reality (AR) involves superimposing digital content such as sound, images and text onto the world we see. YouTube's AR Try-On ads are shown to users in a split-screen format. Video plays on the top part of the split-screen while camera view appears at the bottom. A user can then see what he or she looks like after trying the make-up featured in the video.  

By using these new YouTube advertising features, marketers can run more effective campaigns and gain a competitive edge.   

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Using TV Sync to Capitalize on Virtual Sports

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, traditional live sports are not taking place. This has led to the popularity of virtual sports among the fans.

In order to maintain their fanbase and generate advertising revenues, the organizers of sports such as horse-racing, motor-racing, football, boxing, baseball, cycling, etc. are increasingly streaming virtual sports on various online platforms like YouTube and Twitch, and even are broadcasting virtual sporting events on traditional television platforms.

As people are not being able to enjoy the real games, they are turning to live streaming and broadcasting of virtual sports, and taking pleasure in watching participants playing games. They are also themselves excitedly taking part in those video games.

MotoGP has introduced the "Stay At Home GP" virtual races. These virtual tournaments are proving out to be eventful motorcycle races as spectators are extremely glad to watch what they have been missing for a long time. They are thrilled to watch motorcycle racing legends once again competing with each other.

British broadcaster Sky broadcasted virtual Bahrain Grand Prix, which proved to be a great success. The e-WBSS (World Boxing Super Series) organized a virtual boxing tournament with some of the best boxers. The fights were arranged between those boxers that we one can only think of fighting against each other in his or her dreams. The tournament drew massive audience engagement and proved to be a great success.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the importance of virtual sports for people has strengthened. Virtual sporting events provide a great way for organizers to generate revenue from advertising, while for the brands they turn out to be an effective way to reach audiences through advertising.

But with consumers' cross-screen behavior, brands cannot fully achieve their advertising goals by advertising only on TV. A study showed that more than 90% of the participants kept a smartphone near them while watching TV, just like the remote control of TV. To capitalize on the cross-screen behavior of consumers, it has become important for marketers to use the TV sync technology.

TV syncing allows marketers to show ads on a viewer’s smartphone through social media platforms at the same time when same or related ads are appearing on the TV. This sync marketing technology also allows communicating brand messages through second screens right at the moment when something important occurs in the virtual sports competitions such as a goal during a virtual football match.

Two types of TV sync are available - self-sync and competition-sync. Self-sync allows a brand to capitalize on TV viewers’ cross-screen behavior by simultaneously displaying its own ads on both TV and social media. Competition sync allows a brand to capitalize on competitors’ TV ads by displaying its ads on social media at the same time when its competitor’s TV commercial is running.

During the coronavirus times, when virtual sports are being adored by sports fans across the globe, the real-time sports sync advertising technology offers a perfect way to brands to communicate their messages by leveraging consumers' cross-screen behavior.  

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Effective Ways for Marketers for YouTube Targeting

YouTube is the most popular video hosting website in the world with most extensive catalog of online videos. The number of monthly logged-in users on YouTube is about 2 billion. YouTube offers tremendous opportunities to advertisers.

YouTube provides a wide range of ad formats and varied targeting options to marketers, enabling them to effectively and easily reach their target audience. It is important for marketers to use the right YouTube targeting options in order to drive success to their YouTube advertising campaigns. Using basic keyword and topic targeting at the start may not result in success. Below are discussed some of the hand-picked ways that you as a marketer can use for targeting on YouTube -

Custom Intent Audiences

This targeting option helps marketers in reaching new customers on YouTube on the basis of the keywords used by the users to search for products and services on Google.com. It is not necessary that these audiences have any previous interaction with your brand. These are built from users who have recently searched the keywords that were used by you for to creating your audience.

Some of the great custom intent audiences that you can test out for your video advertising campaigns on YouTube are -

·       Converting search queries - You can use your list of converting queries from your search campaigns to display video ads to users who have searched for these queries.

·       Converting keywords – These keywords are not the same as converting search queries. You can create a different audience based on these.

·       Competitor terms - These allow you to show your video ads to users that are actively searching for your competitors.  

·       Best-selling products - You can create an audience from your best-selling products. You can easily find these products from the sales report of your e-commerce platform.  

Life Events

Life Events can prove to be a great targeting option. It allows you to show ads to customers during life milestones such as starting a business, graduating from college, changing or starting a job, getting married, purchasing a house, retiring from job, etc.

These life events provide a great opportunity to brands, which offer products or services needed in these moments, to emotionally connect with consumers. For effective targeting via life events, your video creative should clearly show consumers how your brand can help them go through these milestones smoothly.

TrueView Discovery Ads

TrueView discovery ads appear on the search results and watch pages on YouTube. YouTube is a huge search engine, next only to Google.com. It allows users to conduct search for specific videos that they are interested in. TrueView discovery ads campaign is unique as a video advertising campaign as it is the only one in Google Ads that allows marketers to target just the YouTube's search results page.

Combining keyword targeting with TrueView discovery campaigns offers a great way to capitalize on user intent. By running TrueView discovery ad campaigns, marketers can take over the top spot of the search results page on YouTube.

Computer Vision-Powered Contextual Targeting

This is a highly effective YouTube targeting method that enables marketers to dramatically boost the performance of their YouTube video advertising campaigns. Computer vision enables AI advertising platforms to detect and understand contexts in online videos. Faces, emotions, logos, objects, activities and scenes in online videos can be detected with high accuracy.

By using computer vision powered contextual targeting, you can place your ad against the video content that is highly relevant to the ad, i.e. your ad is fully in line with the content the user is actively engaging with. As the ad shown matches the current interest of the user, the chances of user viewing or clicking the ad are very high.

AI contextual targeting powered by computer vision offers a very high degree of contextual relevance unmatched by other methods of contextual advertising such as keyword targeting, which fail to fully reflect the user’s current state of mind and cannot understand nuances in context.

The above-mentioned, hand-picked ways for YouTube targeting will help marketers in effectively achieving their YouTube advertising goals.    

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Beyond Black and White: The True Color of Brand Safety

Over the past few years, a lot of brand safety issues have surfaced that have led marketers to review their brand safety measures. The current coronavirus crisis has intensified the brand safety woes of marketers, as most of the brands don't want ad adjacency to the content dealing with morbidity and mortality.  

Common brand safety methods used by marketers include blacklisting and whitelisting. Blacklisting involves avoiding placement of ads against content containing one or more blocked keywords. In case of video content, a blocked keyword is searched in topic, title, description and metadata.

Keyword-based blacklisting method is in reality not that effective as it seems to be. It is marred by under- and over-blocking of content. Research shows that because of the use of keyword blacklists, more than half of the safe stories published on the major news platforms are being incorrectly tagged as brand unsafe.

Keyword-based blacklisting method can lead to blocking of completely innocuous content. This is because it fails to comprehend the nuances in context, i.e. it is unable to understand the true context in which a keyword is used. For example, if "alcohol" is the blocked keyword, then the blacklisting method will not only tag a video featuring drunk and driving as unsafe, but will also tag a video featuring a recipe in which alcohol has been used as one of the ingredients, as unsafe.

Another problem with blacklisting is that universal blacklists cannot be created. They have to be regularly updated and modified according to the brands' requirements, current happenings and events, latest news, countries, languages and culture. There is also a requirement to tweak blacklists regularly on the basis of current safe content consumption patterns of consumers, so that increased reach for the advertising campaigns can be achieved. Overall, keyword-based blacklisting method is quite cumbersome to implement as it needs a lot of fine-tuning. With this method, content under- and over-blocking is a common problem, and this hinders marketers in getting optimal results from their advertising campaigns.

A whitelist enlists content that has been labeled as safe for ads to be placed against it. A whitelist provides a safe and trusted environment to brands to advertise within. Curating a whitelist for advertising on a video platform, for example for YouTube advertising, involves tagging unsafe content at the keyword, topic, video and channel levels. Video-level tagging helps brands to filter out unsafe videos from an otherwise safe channel; brands do not have to blacklist the entire channel just because of one or few unsafe videos.

Again, like keyword blacklists, whitelists need to be regularly updated, otherwise the campaigns will not witness an increase in reach, and brands will miss newer safe and engaging content for their ads; ads will keep displaying against the same video content enlisted in the static whitelist.  

Creation of whitelists is not an easy process; it requires a lot of curation by marketers, and is time-consuming and expensive. As the whitelisting method limits the number of videos against which ads can be placed, marketers are unable to take the full advantage of the true potential of huge video hosting platforms like YouTube. The campaign's reach gets reduced and the right audience does not get fully targeted.

The above-mentioned brand safety methods provide only suboptimal brand safety and have significant limitations. A highly effective way of ensuring brand suitability and safety is provided by contextual brand safety method that makes use of AI and computer vision. AI-powered brand safety platforms that deploy computer vision technology, provide high degree of context relevance unmatched by keyword-based methods.

Computer vision can accurately detect contexts in videos such as faces, objects, logos, on-screen text, emotions, scenes and activities. Thus, it can effectively detect unsafe or harmful contexts in videos without the risk of under- and over-blocking of content.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, computer vision-powered brand safety platforms enable brands to selectively block ads against mortality-related coronavirus content, while allowing ad placement against positive coronavirus content. Thus, brands can safely capitalize on the news content; this is not possible with keyword-blacklists that fail to understand the true context in which the keyword "coronavirus" is being used.

By using AI-based contextual brand safety method, marketers can not only effectively block ad placement against recognized unsafe categories, but can also custom define unsuitable contexts that are unique to a brand. This helps them provide a fully suitable environment to brands for advertising.          

Computer vision enables marketers to go beyond blacklists and whitelists in order to achieve brand safety in its true color.    

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Using Computer Vision for Effective Visual Content Strategy

Visual formats such as images and videos are embraced by people over just a plain piece of text. Images and video enable brands to bring life to their messages, making consumers better understand their products and services. For brands, an effective and strong visual content strategy drives engagement and sales.

Research shows that brands are using visual formats much more on their own platforms and their social media pages for conveying messages to consumers, but less frequently in display ads.

But what is causing marketers to give less preference to display ads when it comes to using highly effective content formats - images and videos - for communication with the consumers? Research shows that using their own platforms allow them to exercise more control over their visual content in comparison to putting it out on the uncontrolled internet in the form of ads. There is enormous competition and it is hard for marketers to ensure that they are reaching their targets and drawing user engagement.

Another reason that marketers cite is of brand safety. Enormous amount of content is uploaded on the internet on daily basis and marketers have no idea against what content their ads would get displayed. On their own platforms, whole content is under their control.

Research shows that when it comes to using visual content for increasing user engagement, raising brand awareness and generating revenue, marketers face the following issues – insufficient viewability, contextual irrelevance, and ineffective demographic targeting. Data privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), along with the gradual phasing-out of third-party cookies in Chrome by Google, have made practices like demographic targeting all the more difficult.  

The problems that hinder the use of visual formats by marketers in display advertising, namely – insufficient control over ad placement, insufficient user engagement, brand unsafe environment and data privacy laws – can be resolved through contextual targeting.

Contextual targeting involves placement of an ad against the content that is relevant to the ad, i.e. the ad is in line with the content that the user is currently interested in. Contextually targeted ads readily capture the attention of users and increase their chances of viewing or clicking them, as it is likely that users are already interested in the products or services being advertised.

Keywords-based contextual advertising often delivers sub-optimal results as keywords fail to fully reflect the user’s current state of mind, while AI-powered solutions that utilize technologies such as NLP and semantic analysis fail to understand nuanced contexts and complex relationships that exist between words.

The true contextual targeting can only be achieved through computer vision. By leveraging computer vision, marketers can take control of their visual content strategy and use visual formats to run highly effective video advertising campaigns, without worrying about data privacy and brand safety issues.

Computer vision is an advanced technology that enables computers to understand images and videos. Computer vision uses deep learning to make computers learn how to detect patterns in images and streaming videos.

Computer vision powered contextual advertising technology works by accurately detecting contexts in streaming videos in order to display in-video ads that are in line with what the user is actively engaging with. Any content that is unsafe or unsuitable is contextually filtered out to provide true brand suitability.

Computer vision enables marketers to embrace contextual targeting and fully utilize their visual content for achieving their marketing goals.

[silverpush]

Using Computer Vision for Effective Visual Content Strategy

Visual formats such as images and videos are embraced by people over just a plain piece of text. Images and video enable brands to bring life to their messages, making consumers better understand their products and services. For brands, an effective and strong visual content strategy drives engagement and sales.

Research shows that brands are using visual formats much more on their own platforms and their social media pages for conveying messages to consumers, but less frequently in display ads.

But what is causing marketers to give less preference to display ads when it comes to using highly effective content formats - images and videos - for communication with the consumers? Research shows that using their own platforms allow them to exercise more control over their visual content in comparison to putting it out on the uncontrolled internet in the form of ads. There is enormous competition and it is hard for marketers to ensure that they are reaching their targets and drawing user engagement.

Another reason that marketers cite is of brand safety. Enormous amount of content is uploaded on the internet on daily basis and marketers have no idea against what content their ads would get displayed. On their own platforms, whole content is under their control.

Research shows that when it comes to using visual content for increasing user engagement, raising brand awareness and generating revenue, marketers face the following issues – insufficient viewability, contextual irrelevance, and ineffective demographic targeting. Data privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), along with the gradual phasing-out of third-party cookies in Chrome by Google, have made practices like demographic targeting all the more difficult. 

 The problems that hinder the use of visual formats by marketers in display advertising, namely – insufficient control over ad placement, insufficient user engagement, brand unsafe environment and data privacy laws – can be resolved through contextual targeting.

Contextual targeting involves placement of an ad against the content that is relevant to the ad, i.e. the ad is in line with the content that the user is currently interested in. Contextually targeted ads readily capture the attention of users and increase their chances of viewing or clicking them, as it is likely that users are already interested in the products or services being advertised.

Keywords-based contextual advertising often delivers sub-optimal results as keywords fail to fully reflect the user’s current state of mind, while AI-powered solutions that utilize technologies such as NLP and semantic analysis fail to understand nuanced contexts and complex relationships that exist between words.

The true contextual targeting can only be achieved through computer vision. By leveraging computer vision, marketers can take control of their visual content strategy and use visual formats to run highly effective video advertising campaigns, without worrying about data privacy and brand safety issues.

Computer vision is an advanced technology that enables computers to understand images and videos. Computer vision uses deep learning to make computers learn how to detect patterns in images and streaming videos.

Computer vision powered contextual advertising technology works by accurately detecting contexts in streaming videos in order to display in-video ads that are in line with what the user is actively engaging with. Any content that is unsafe or unsuitable is contextually filtered out to provide true brand suitability.

Computer vision enables marketers to embrace contextual targeting and fully utilize their visual content for achieving their marketing goals.