Dive Brief:
- YouTube is introducing new advertising capabilities for its short-form video offering, Shorts, according to a company release. The unveiling of the new features is timed to the IAB NewFronts this week.
- Shorts and in-feed video ads are extending into video reach campaigns, which use artificial intelligence to serve the ideal combinations of ads. Targeting solution YouTube Select will also be compatible with Shorts to pair ads with trending content.
- The move sees YouTube looking to stay relevant in the competitive short-form landscape and arrives as the platform’s declining ad revenue continues to pose a challenge for Google and parent company Alphabet.
Dive Insight:
In the uphill chase to compete with TikTok, YouTube is upping the incentive for advertisers to use its Shorts video format and drive the platform’s monetization, an admitted weak point compared to its longer-form counterparts, though the ability to advertise on Shorts was only introduced a year ago.
Perhaps most notable, Shorts and in-feed videos will now be applicable for video reach campaigns, which rely on AI to help brands maximize reach through the use of multiple ad formats. With the update, marketers would need to include a 60-second vertical video, or shorter, along with other assets.
Paramount+ was among the first to test the latest version of video reach campaigns as an early partner, relying on YouTube’s in-stream, in-feed and Shorts ad experiences to promote the streaming platform’s new movie, “At Midnight.” Results of the campaign included higher efficiencies and higher ad recall when compared to in-stream ads alone, per announcement details.
Additionally, YouTube is bringing its Select targeting tool to Shorts to pair ads alongside trending and relevant content in users’ Shorts feed. An additional ad positioning tool, which is piloting with YouTube Select, will allow advertisers to display ads at the start of a users’ viewing session to make them more visible.
Offering new marketer capabilities within Shorts could help offset ongoing struggles with YouTube, which in the first quarter saw ad revenue slide 3% year-over-year to $6.69 billion, contributing to two consecutive quarters of advertising revenue declines for Google. Still, YouTube has been able to attract viewers and creators to Shorts, with the offering surpassing 50 billion daily views in February.
Others are similarly looking to build out short-form offerings to better compete against TikTok, which continues to gain share of video ad budgets while remaining a favorite among younger audiences. Among major players, Meta in the first quarter boosted monetization efficiency for its TikTok lookalike Reels by using AI, noting that people now reshare Reels posts more than 2 billion times daily. On a similar note, Snap’s short-video format Spotlight reached over 350 million average monthly active users in Q1, a 46% YoY jump.
