YouTube Launches New ‘Video Reach Campaign’ Ad Format, Brings ‘TrueView For Action’ To Home Feeds

Coinciding with Advertising Week, which kicks off today in New York, YouTube has announced a brand new format called Video Reach Campaigns.

The product will allow advertisers to upload multiple video creatives into a single Video Reach Campaign, whereby Google will harness machine learning technology to serve the most efficient combination of different YouTube ads — including six-second bumpers, or skippable or non-skippable in-stream ads — in order to maximize reach. The benefit of Video Reach Campaigns is that they don’t require marketers to manage separate campaigns for the aforementioned formats; it distributes an optimized combination automatically.

While YouTube ads can serve multiple purposes — including perception shift, to drive specific actions, or to increase brand awareness — Video Reach Campaigns target this latter objective, Vishal Sharma, YouTube’ss VP of product management, wrote in a company blog post.

Sharma notes that one early tester of the format is Ford

, which found that it was able to decrease campaign costs by over 20%.

In addition to Video Reach Campaigns, YouTube is bringing its TrueView For Action ad format to YouTube home feeds. TrueView For Action ads are distinguished by the fact that they feature a prominent call-to-action — such as linking viewers to a product or service, or asking them to share their contact info — via headline text overlay or on video end screens. TrueView For Action campaigns can only run as skippable in-stream ads, but were not previously available on the Home feed, which is where viewers can discover new creators as sorted by YouTube recommendations.

In addition to the Video Reach Campaign and TrueView For Action updates, YouTube announced last week that it is launching its most prominent ad format, the Masthead, on smart TV screens.