Dive Brief:
- YouTube has expanded its partnerships with third-party measurement platforms Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify to help ensure brand safety for advertising campaigns on its Shorts video format, according to separate announcements.
- IAS will now offer its brand safety and suitability measurement product to advertisers on YouTube Shorts under its existing Total Media Quality for YouTube product suite.
- DoubleVerify similarly is expanding its existing YouTube brand safety measurement capabilities to encapsulate Shorts, a move that builds on tools from the platform announced in July around tracking viewability and invalid measurement for ads on the short-form video format.
Dive Insight:
As the need for brand safety and transparency in ad placements becomes increasingly apparent, IAS and Double Verify’s extensions for YouTube Shorts could help the TikTok-lookalike court advertisers and boost its monetization potential. The move comes after parent company Google this year was the subject of controversy when researcher Adalytics released two reports alleging that the firm failed to live up to its standards around third-party video ad placements and its protection of children’s privacy on YouTube.
YouTube Shorts is quickly growing, with over 2 billion users and over 70 billion views each day. To help ensure the safety of brands, IAS will help provide assurance that video ads on Shorts appear in brand safe and suitable content with “video-level transparency,” per release details, following the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) framework.
New measurement functionality for advertisers follows other recent attempts by YouTube to boost the monetization of Shorts. In November, the company began testing a discovery option to guide users toward Shorts content, while it has also recently explored generative AI features with the short-form format.
The latest expansion builds on the launch of Total Media Quality for YouTube earlier this year, a move that has helped offer marketers a new level of insight into video content through artificial intelligence-driven technology and widened reporting capabilities, Lisa Utzschneider, CEO, IAS, detailed in press materials. Using the product suite, marketers can view both brand safety and suitability metrics for ads on YouTube Shorts in addition to viewability and invalid traffic measurement globally.
“With this expansion of our measurement capabilities on YouTube, we can bring marketers the most actionable data to maximize their safety on YouTube Shorts inventory — one of the fastest growing video formats in digital advertising,” Utzschneider said in the release.
Similar functionality will be available through DoubleVerify’s expanded offerings to allow advertisers on Shorts to measure and verify campaign alignment with suitable videos. The functionality touts capabilities like DoubleVerify’s use of manual reviews and AI-driven tools to help advertisers correctly classify Shorts videos, while consistent settings and metrics can help advertisers inform media planning and buying decisions across media, per release details.
The move by DoubleVerify follows an announcement in July that it would offer viewability and invalid traffic measurement on Shorts. The platform has provided those functions across YouTube and Google ad serving solutions since 2011.
Google parent Alphabet grew revenue 11% year-over-year in Q3, with YouTube growing 12% YoY to $7.95 billion during the period.
