Know Their Intention, Get Their Attention: Video Advertising in the Age of Assistance

We’re living in a time when people expect technology to help them get things done, quickly and easily. That’s what the constant demand for new devices, advances in machine learning, and explosion of data tell us. At Google, we have a name for this new era: “The Age of Assistance.” Consumers want solutions to problems that haven’t even occurred to them yet—and they expect brand experiences to guide them along the way.

This new expectation is game-changing for advertising. While people used to accept that ads would interrupt their agendas, they now expect ads to advance agendas by meeting and anticipating their needs. That puts a lot of pressure on advertisers. After all, what is the best way for ads to be helpful?

When it comes to video, the answer is simple but challenging: Make your ads relevant. Our research shows that when brands make their video ads relevant, they’re awarded the scarcest commodity in our industry: consumer attention. Our latest research with Ipsos suggests that people are three times more likely to pay attention when they’re watching online video ads than when they’re watching ads on TV. (1) And beyond that, relevant video ads get three times the attention of an average video ad. (2)    

Making ads that actively advance consumers’ agendas,  are widely relevant, and grab attention can seem daunting. That’s why we’ve introduced three new tools that can help with the heavy lifting: intent signals, personalized creative at scale, and video ad sequencing.

The right people: Reach your best audience with intent signals on YouTube

To be helpful, you need to anticipate your consumers’ needs; to anticipate their needs, you need a good idea of what they’re in the market for. That’s where intent signals come in. Intent signals go beyond an audience’s identity or context to reach someone based on their intent: what they want, what they’re in the market for, and what they need at any particular time. Meeting someone’s intention is what has made search so powerful for so long—the ability to quickly help someone with what they want or need in the moment.

We recently launched Custom Affinity Audiences, a tool that brings the power of intent-based targeting using search signals to YouTube. And in September, at Advertising Week, we announced an exciting expansion that brings intent signals to YouTube from not just search, but maps and apps too.

What does that actually mean for advertisers? Let’s take the example of a consumer interested in buying a winter coat. In the old days, if brands wanted to target video ads for winter coats, they could guess that a demographic that might be more likely to buy winter coats (say, women 18-34) or psychographics that might be particularly into preparing for winter (say, ski enthusiasts). Intent signals eliminate that guesswork. Instead, brands can serve ads to people who searched for winter coat deals, spent a lot of time scouting nearby ski resorts, or scrolled through coats in a shopping app.

Or, to explore an example from a real brand, Groupon recently wanted to reach a younger audience about the deals they offer on everything from salons to restaurants to live music. Groupon used intent signals to reach millennials who frequently looked up nail salons on Maps or searched for restaurants on Search. In other words, they refined their targeting to focus on the specific need they were aiming to solve. They were helpful—and it worked. Groupon saw a large 21% lift in brand favorability. Thanks in part to their success on YouTube, Groupon acquired more customers than they had in four years.

Across the many brands that have already used intent signals, the results are telling. Campaigns that use intent-based targeting on mobile have 20% higher Ad Recall lift and 50% higher Brand Awareness lift relative to campaigns that only use demographic targeting. (3)

The right creative: Engage your audience with customized creative at scale

Your ads are helpful when they reach relevant groups of people, and they're even more helpful when the ad creative itself is relevant, too. But we know that creating relevant creative at scale can be expensive and arduous for brands and agencies.

That’s why YouTube recently released a new tool called Director Mix that helps brands solve for this. Director Mix turns brands’ layered files into dozens—or even hundreds—of personalized video ads by swapping images, text, and other video elements and serving them based on intent signals.

McDonald’s recently used Director Mix to drive relevancy for the Big Mac with millennials. McDonald’s created 77 different six-second ads targeted to their audience’s viewing interests, such as watching a movie trailer or live comedy clip. The customized six-second ads earned more than double the ad recall of the control ads in the campaign.

The right moment: Decide the sequence in which they experience your story

In addition to the right audience and creative, your brand’s story should be told in the right sequence. To help you build an ad story that unfolds over time, we recently introduced Video Ad Sequencing. It’s a new feature in AdWords Labs that lets you string together creative across multiple ad units to the same consumer.

For instance, you could start with a fifteen-second TrueView ad to build awareness, continue with another, longer spot that communicates product attributes, then follow with a six-second bumper ad to keep top-of-mind and drive to purchase. You can pivot, you can react—and you can take consumers down a different path depending on which ads are working for them.

Brands like Ubisoft have already taken advantage of Video Ad Sequencing. Ubisoft wanted to drum up excitement for their Assassin’s Creed video game among gamers, so they cut several six-second bumper ads from a longer trailer and served them sequentially to core gaming affinity audiences. They reached YouTube's mobile-first audience who were more inclined to watch shorter ads, unfolding the same story in a way those viewers found appealing. The campaign reached almost 15 million unique users and drove a 25% best-in-class awareness lift and 224% search lift for Assassin’s Creed. Some of the viewers were sufficiently hooked that they went back and engaged with the original trailer.

Three takeaways

To help your consumers—and, in the process, grab their attention—your video ads should be as relevant as possible. As you work toward that goal, here are three takeaways to keep in mind.

• Assistance. Consumers should feel that your brand’s video advertising helps them, not interrupts them.
• Intention. Take advantage of intent signals from Search, Maps, and Apps to go beyond demographics and psychographics to reach people based on what they want and need at any particular time.
• Personalization. Research shows relevance is one of the top reasons people pay more attention to video ads. Take advantage of Director Mix to serve relevant creative at scale and Video Ad Sequencing to serve them in the right order.

For more thoughts on how brands can thrive in the the age of assistance, check out Tara’s Advertising Week keynote with Wendy Clark, CEO of DDB North America, here.

(1): Google/Ipsos, Video Mobile Diary, US, 2017, n of 4,381 (saw ads occasions).

(2): Google/Ipsos, Video Mobile Diary, US, 2017, n of 4,381 (saw ads occasions).

(3): Google Brand Lift Targeting Analysis Oct 2016 - Mar 2017, Global, Smartphone, numbers shown represent relative difference between additive lifts of intent targeted and demo targeted campaigns, i.e. the former had Brand Awareness lift 1.5x the latter.