The secret to unleashing your full creative potential from Advertising Week New York 2024

Find out how Google AI can help you take your creativity to new heights on YouTube

AI is arguably the biggest topic in the ad industry right now — but it’s not new news. AI has been working for marketers for some time, creating efficiencies across the board for your video campaigns. In fact, without making a single change to your creative assets, Google’s AI-enabled ad formats are already delivering outsized unique reach compared to campaigns that are manually optimized*. Now, its rapid evolution is helping marketers produce high-quality work in a fraction of the time.

Transform every aspect of the creative process with AI?

YouTube Advertisers’ Global Head of Creative Strategy & Programs, No?l Paasch, said “Generative AI will — and is — unlocking enormous creative potential.” She took to the stage at Advertising Week New York to talk about how you can harness the best of Google AI to unleash your creativity across YouTube.?

Google AI is in the DNA of YouTube. From surfacing relevant content based on predictive AI learnings to improving accessibility with automatic captions, it powers so much of what people love about the platform — and it powers the ad experiences that help run your business.?

Here’s how it can help you enhance every stage of the creative process:

Learn

Bringing information together is the? foundation — everything from research, insights, and brand standards to your past creatives and their results. Gemini models can easily process these kinds of inputs to help inform your campaigns.?

• The Google Pixel team partnered with agency WPP to leverage a customized model they built using the Gemini API to understand which creative attributes of their video assets, like sound and text, formed the right mix to get results. The big takeaway? What would have taken over a week took less than an hour — helping the team avoid millions of dollars in media waste by focusing on what’s proven to work.?

Ideate

The ideation phase has some of the richest potential for Generative AI. It can help you uncover that big idea that sits at the center of your campaign.?

Take it from digital marketing agency Monks who worked with Hatch, the makers of “Devices to Help You Sleep Better,” to uncover audience insights with AI. The team provided Gemini App with the target audience for their campaign and asked it to create personas, rank the top three, and provide insights into each one’s behavior, hobbies, and preferences about how Hatch’s product would fit their lifestyles. Not only did integrating Google AI into the ideation process make the teams more efficient, but the campaign saw 80% higher CTR and 31% better CPA compared to other ecommerce brands’ Performance Max campaigns.?

Another easy way you can use Gemini in the ideation phase is through Gems, a feature that is baked into the Gemini interface. Gems lets you customize Gemini to create your own team of AI experts to help you tackle any challenge you may have. For example, you could use a Brainstormer Gem for an upcoming video campaign. Grounded in knowledge from your creative brief, market research, and more, it can help you ideate so you get to the creative work you want to do faster.?

Create

Google AI can help you build and scale your ads — all while ensuring that you have full creative control.?

Let’s look at YouTube Shorts. Not only do they have 2 billion monthly viewers, but of all the channels uploading content to YouTube each month, 70% are uploading Shorts — making it a huge opportunity for both creators and marketers.?

Tools like AI-powered Dream Screen help creators quickly transform their ideas into videos. By creating backgrounds with a simple prompt, Dream Screen offers new settings that are only limited by what creators can imagine. It even uses AI to streamline the production process — turning long-form videos into Shorts, or generating new concepts and ideas. And soon some creators can make 4K or 8K high-resolution video backgrounds with Veo, our video generation model, helping them continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible on YouTube — and how entertaining ads can be.?

As an advertiser, working with creators is one of the easiest ways to make unmissable ads that engage your audiences and bring your brand ideas to life.?

We’re investing in ways to make working with creators easier than ever through partnership ads powered by Brand Connect. With partnership ads, you can use videos made by a creator and promote them as ads — whether they’re from existing collaborations and paid promotions or new sponsored content that you’ll make with creators. And they can be the creative engine for your AI-powered campaigns.?

These co-branded ads drive serious performance. To date, we’ve seen that creator ads that live on the creator’s channel drove upwards of 20% higher conversions on Shorts than ads with advertiser branding alone. That means you can tap into a creator’s community and influence.?

Expand

AI-powered campaigns in YouTube can version and scale assets easily, so your brand connects with more consumers faster than ever before, expanding your reach and saving you time.

For the latest Pixel 8a campaign, the team used Demand Gen — our campaign type designed to find people who would be interested in your products through visual storytelling. The team started with nine different themes, like lifestyle, product-focused, and promo-focused, with different creative inputs like photography, video, and copy, and Demand Gen used generative AI to create 4,500 different ad variations that ran across YouTube, Discover and Gmail.?

We covered a lot about how Google AI can help enhance the creative process — so here’s a quick recap:?

• Use historical creative performance data to build rich insights to learn from and inform future creative briefs?
• Use the Gemini app and Gems to ideate, brainstorm, and explore audience segments
• Lean into the community at the top of YouTube’s AI innovations: creators. Partnership ads powered by Brand Connect can help you create more authentic and resonant ads that work on the platform
• Expand your reach easily by letting your AI-powered campaigns on YouTube do the heavy lifting to help you drive greater results.?

Whether you’re looking to learn, ideate, create, or expand, there are infinite possibilities to unleash creativity with Google AI. We hope this inspires you to use the tech to connect with your audience in new ways and make space for meaningful work.?

Tune in to our next newsletter edition — and share this with someone who wants to learn more about how the power of Google AI can help unleash video creativity on YouTube.?

Want more exclusive insights? Sign up for Re:View to dive into the latest thought leadership around marketing, video culture, and more.

Source:

* In Alpha testing, Video reach campaigns for Efficient Reach opted into a fluid mix of In-Stream, In-Feed, and Shorts drive on average 54% more Unique Reach than In-Stream only. In Alpha testing, Video reach campaigns for Efficient Reach opted into a fluid mix of In-Stream, In-Feed, and Shorts achieve on average 42% lower CPMs than In-Stream only.