YouTube wants to help brands get more out of their video ads.
Starting today, the platform will offer a new service to marketers, allowing them to advertise product in a feed alongside video ads.
“Video until now has been great at being immersive, but hasn’t been the most actionable traditionally,” said Avi Fein, product manager at YouTube. The new product, Trueview for shopping, doesn’t enable purchases directly from YouTube – it’s a vehicle to make an ad more relevant. The service can publish images and pricing information appropriate to the user watching the ad.
Fein said the process was being broken down “so the unit is more relevant and custom and provides more information.” The project began when YouTube realized how viewer behavior was shifting. Video began as the TV model, but is now available all the time, with people watching different types of videos throughout the day, from how-tos to product reviews.
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Already, there are upward of one million channels on YouTube focused solely on product reviews. The number of product review videos has grown 50 percent year-over-year. He added that one in four shoppers say they use YouTube to search for a video related to products while they’re in-store.
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But these videos, expensive to produce, are designed to appeal to a mass audience. To make them actionable means enhancing the level of personalization, which for Fein could be as simple as bringing more brand assets into the video experience. Also, it works with existing campaigns so creating new content isn’t required. Brands can use optimization and retargeting to select products.
For example, if a retailer were to air a Black Friday TV ad on all platforms, they could personalize per user on YouTube by posting product ads that are custom to the viewer. Fein explained that a brand could use a single video campaign and tailor the content and product ads that go with it, instead of creating multiple video ads.
Sephora was among the first to sign up as a beta tester.
YouTube has more than one billion users with 300 hours of video uploaded each minute.