YouTube Accelerates Launch Of Connected TV Ad Products Amid Coronavirus Viewership Boom

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.

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%).