Supercharged creativity — and insights from 8,000+ ads

AI is powering new ways to explore and create on YouTube — while also helping marketers reach deeply engaged viewers, and deliver meaningful results for their businesses. And when we apply AI for our billions of users, creators and businesses, the impact is exponential.?

Fresh from the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, we’re excited to share highlights from the week, including ways Google and YouTube are building products that leverage AI to drive your creativity to new heights.

Supercharging marketing and creativity in the AI era

Google’s VP and GM of Ads Vidhya Srinivasan, and Creative Director of Google Creative Lab Alexander Chen discussed the current opportunity for creatives to experiment with AI. The key takeaways:

1. You don't need any special expertise to start playing with AI — and, in fact, play may be the best way to discover ways to apply AI.
2. AI isn’t taking the pencil out of our hands — it’s letting us create with a new kind of pencil.?
3. AI doesn’t have your taste or ingenuity — but it will help you explore ideas fast. Beachgoers at Cannes got to try out Dream Screen, an experimental feature that lets creators create an AI-generated green-screen background for their YouTube Shorts through a text prompt.

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity beachgoer demos Dream Screen.

Unlocking insights from 8,000+ ads

Whether it’s a father who’s lost his speech using Apple phone features to connect with his daughter, or Gen Z expressing their own unique style with a little help from TISSOT, ads that connect with consumers find huge audiences on YouTube.?

To help brands and marketers figure out what works, data scientists at YouTube built a custom AI tool to analyze more than 8,000 top-performing ads — and extract insights including sentiment, themes, visual elements, music, cultural references, and more.?

Gemini 1.5 Pro then took thousands of these insights and distilled them into key takeaways, uncovering trends, best practices, and the subtle nuances that set top-performing videos apart.

So what makes a great ad on YouTube? Authentic representation, self-expression, and depictions of community all help drive connection — and so can creator partnerships and YouTube Shorts. Here are the top findings.

Peloton Interactive’s “Yes. I. Can.” campaign features an instructor offering inspirational words to people as they exercise, including an athlete with a prosthetic runner’s blade.

Opening up new possibilities for brands

AI is already helping marketers to build new brand universes, leveraging existing data and creative inputs to create variations and endless creative possibilities.?

No?l Paasch, Global Creative Director at YouTube, discussed how:

• AI is delivering on YouTube. Google's Al-enabled ad formats are already delivering outsized reach and lower CPMs across formats and surfaces in video. And with our newly introduced Product Studio, you can now create video assets in seconds with just one image.

• Generative AI will unlock enormous opportunities for creativity. The power of AI is about building a true brand universe that houses every aspect of who you are, from data to brand identity to creative assets. You can begin to see how integrating all the inputs of your brand and using Al to learn, ideate, create, and expand can increase efficiencies, drive greater results, and create a bespoke learning engine by identifying patterns that you can leverage.

• Google is here to help. No matter where you are in this process of discovery and harnessing the power and potential that Al offers to every part of your business, Google is here with the tools, the resources and the ambition to be your collaborator.

Where do you start? To help, we interviewed 15 global leaders in marketing who are already using AI to redefine creativity — read about the three key insights they shared here.?

Leaders in conversation: entertainment, creativity, AI and influence

At the YouTube-sponsored Black At Cannes event, marketing leaders including NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson, McDonald’s VP of Culture & Marketing Elizabeth Campbell, and Weber Shandwick Head of Brand Impact Lewis Williams came together to discuss navigating a new era of media, how AI is driving creative processes and acting as a growth driver, and more. We also asked attendees for their perspective on the future of creativity — check out responses from Peter Ukhurebor, Reggie Butler, Gabrielle Dallas Wesley, Nichelle Sanders, Lewis Williams, Derrick Johnson, God-is Rivera, and Aba Blackson.

Tune in to our next newsletter edition to see what other innovations YouTube has in store — and share this one with someone who needs to read it.

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