Given the digital video boom brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, YouTube has accelerated the launch of several advertising tools to help marketers navigate a new — and decidedly gloomy — economical landscape.
The first tool measures Brand Lift from YouTube ads that run on smart TV screens — given that viewership on connected TVs shot up 80% year-over-year in March given stay-at-home directives, YouTube notes, citing Comscore data. “In fact, over 60% of signed-in viewers of YouTube on TV screens watched a video published in the last seven days,” Debbie Weinstein, VP of global video and YouTube solutions, wrote in a blog post.
Brand Lift is a survey taken by viewers (pictured below) that frequently appears in the YouTube mobile app, and which has now been optimized for the big screen to be taken with a TV remote control. Launching in early Q3 for YouTube TV, YouTube says Brand Lift survey results enable marketers to glean insight about ad performance and make decisions about campaigns in real-time.
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Another ad product that YouTube is bringing to connected TVs is skippable ads for content that is being casted onto TV screens. This format joins Masthead ads — YouTube’s priciest and most prominent ad format that spans the full width of the top of the YouTube homepag — which launched on connected TVs late last year.
In terms of year-over-year TV screen watch-time growth for the month beginning March 11, YouTube say that feature-length movies is the biggest content category, with an 800% jump, followed by TV shows (125%), and live content (250%). On YouTube TV, which is only available in the U.S., the biggest growth categories were feature-length movies (250%), TV shows (300%), documentaries (350%), and news (450%).
