[go: up one dir, main page]

In partnership with The Webby Awards, we selected 25 of the most iconic ads on YouTube in 2015 based on this year’s YouTube Ads Leaderboard. And for the first week of December, we asked you to vote on your favorites across five fun categories -- and vote, you did! Nominees, marketers and fans alike came out in droves to vote (and tweet) to get your favorite videos to the top.

We’re pleased to share the results of the first-ever #TheYouTubeAd of 2015 contest:

Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Restores Your Faith in Humanity
Compassion. Understanding. Imagination. Which spot reminded you that we're all in this together?
Winner: Imagine The Possibilities | Barbie (BBDO, Starcom)





Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Gets You Going 
It's the ad that made you want to live the dream, put yourself out there, live for today. You voted for the ad that inspired you most. 
Winner: Always #LikeAGirl - Unstoppable (Leo Burnett, Starcom MediaVest Group)



Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Gives You Feels 
You're not emotional. It's just allergies. It's dust in your eye. You voted for the ad that created the biggest feels. 
Winner: Extra Gum: The Story of Sarah & Juan (Energy BBDO, Starcom Mediavest Group, Mediacom) 



Category: #TheYouTubeAd That’s Your Guilty Pleasure 
You know you want it even though you shouldn't. You voted for the ad you can't help but indulge in. 
Winner: Justin Bieber for Calvin Klein (Calvin Klein In-House) 



Category: #TheYouTubeAd You Wish You Were In 
It's time to live vicariously through someone else's imagination. You voted for the ad you most wish you could have been in. 
Winner: Omaze and After-School All-Stars: Arnold Pranks Fans as the Terminator...for Charity (Omaze In-House)


Thank you for voting and congratulations to the winners! And if you just can’t get enough of the top ads of the year, dive into the 2015 Year-End YouTube Ads Leaderboard.

From realizing pipe dreams, to imagining possibilities and removing labels, the best YouTube ads of 2015 were full of energy and feeling. Viewers have been moved, enticed, entertained and surprised by the ads that top creative agencies have delivered this year.
We’ve partnered with The Webby Awards to select 25 nominees based on this year’s YouTube Ads Leaderboard for the most iconic ads of 2015 -- and now you get to cast your ballot for your favorites.
We’ve selected a few fun categories to highlight how some of the best of ads of 2015 have made us all laugh, cry, think, and feel inspired. Starting today, you can vote for:
  • #TheYouTubeAd You Wish You Were In
  • #TheYouTubeAd That Gets You Going
  • #TheYouTubeAd That’s Your Guilty Pleasure
  • #TheYouTubeAd That Gives You Feels
  • #TheYouTubeAd That Restores Your Faith in Humanity
Voting runs through December 8th - and you can help your favorites reach the top by voting once for each category everyday.

As the holiday season gets underway, you're likely focused on reaching holiday shoppers as they browse for gifts for their family and friends. Dynamic creative strategies are key to getting the most relevant messages and products in front of these shoppers. But with consumers' increased usage of mobile devices, you need to build your dynamic creative in HTML5, and this confluence of technologies can lead to complexity.

Streamlining production of dynamic creative in Google Web Designer

To make it easier for you to build relevant and engaging cross-screen creative, we're excited to announce the launch of simplified workflows in Google Web Designer that make it even easier to build dynamic creative in HTML5. You can now easily choose which data signals/feed attributes to connect to each dynamic element, pulling directly from the dynamic profile you've set up in DoubleClick Studio.
We've already seen some teams find success with the new dynamic workflow. Kaymu, one of the largest online retail marketplaces for emerging markets, used Google Web Designer to build an HTML5 dynamic remarketing campaign and show relevant products to shoppers. This strategy drove a 580% increase in CTR compared to their previous, non-HTML5, non-dynamic campaign, and the team's dynamic creative build time dropped from 3 days to 10 minutes.
CyberAgent, a media agency based in Japan, also used Google Web Designer for a recent dynamic remarketing campaign. To provide the time needed to focus on the creative strategy, the team first automated the bidding and targeting for the campaign. They then could build and test several dynamic templates, using advanced animations and multiple dynamic elements. Ultimately, these advanced creatives led to a 40% higher CTR and a 28% lower CPC compared to the previous dynamic remarketing campaign that didn't use Google Web Designer.
In addition to the new dynamic support in Google Web Designer, we're also excited to launch:
  • Animation improvements, which help you build smooth animations
  • Updates to our text authoring capabilities, which make editing and manipulating the text in your ad units much easier and more intuitive
  • Two new components in our components gallery: a Spritesheet component, so you can more easily build out your spritesheets, and a Streetview component, so you can add location-based imagery to your ads. (We've kept this component separate from the Google Maps component to help you keep your file sizes smaller.)

Upcoming Google Web Designer Hangout on Air

Want to learn more about the new features? Sign up for one of our Hangouts on Air. Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager for Google Web Designer, will walk through the new features and take your questions.
  • Wednesday, Dec. 9th @ 12pm ET / 9am PT. RSVP here
  • Thursday, Dec. 10th @ 5pm PT / Friday, Dec. 11th @ 12pm Sydney time (APAC Friendly time) RSVP here
Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

Good. Fast. Cheap.
Old advertising wisdom says pick two.  In today's world, BBDO says pick three.

The mounting pressure of new channels, an ocean of media, and sophisticated and fickle consumers tuning out everything that doesn't interest them means that brands need all three.

Can agencies be agile and excellent at the same time? The only way to find out, as Andrew Robertson, President and CEO of BBDO Worldwide put it, is to have the “confidence to think a little less and to create and experiment a bit more.”

So what happens when you put 10 creative teams into YouTube Spaces around the world and give them 48 hours to shoot, edit and produce videos that deliver on a global brief? And what happens when you test those films on YouTube to see how they perform in the wild?

YouTube + BBDO + TWIXⓇ partnered on the Global Video Create-A-Thon -- a first-of-its-kind, hands-on experience to see what happens when you give 10 teams in four locations limited budgets and 48 hours to create work that resonates globally. Working with Mars and its iconic TWIX global brand, BBDO creatives from around the world were challenged to help TWIX translate its successful “Left TWIX/Right TWIX” fictional rivalry strategy into powerful storytelling that crosses borders. We sought to explore a new way to make content, faster and for less money, without sacrificing quality in today's fast-moving, mobile first landscape.


                          Teams work in YouTube Spaces across São Paulo, London, New York, & Los Angeles.

The ten films then ran as skippable pre-roll on YouTube across three international markets: US, UK and Netherlands. Each creative piece was evaluated for its ability to drive view-through rates and ad recall using YouTube’s TrueView skippable ad platform. A score of 10 was given to the highest performing ad on each of these criteria, and the best performing ad was determined by combined scores across all three markets.

The result?
All 10 ads drove positive ad recall and five of them scored within the top quartile (25%) of all YouTube ads that have been tested since the launch of Brand Lift.

The three top performing ads were not only able to capture people’s attention, but hold it too, successfully leveraging the TWIX rivalry story clearly from the outset:

       
                                                             YouTube vs YouTube: AMV BBDO London

       
                                                                      The Romans: CLM BBDO France

       
                                                               Minotaur: BBDO New York
You can view all ten ads here.

Interestingly, there were no major geographical differences in the performance of the advertising across all three regions. Even with the constraints (time, budget, production), it’s possible to create compelling brand content that crosses borders when you have an insight that is truly global and visual storytelling, told well.
“As we drive toward achieving growth we are proud of for our brands, being a bold fast-mover, thinking globally and taking creative risks is critical to our success,” said Jane Wakely, Global CMO, Mars Chocolate. “In partnering with BBDO and YouTube on this experiment, together we were able to further elevate our TWIX message through powerful storytelling told visually, via agile content creation and across borders.”

TWIX is giving consideration to how best to use this successful content and will be applying the production learnings to future TWIX and other Mars brand projects. In the coming weeks, we’ll share more insights from behind the of scenes of this experiment. Watch this space for more.  

Posted by Sadie Thoma, Head of Creative Agency Partnerships, Agency Sales

The holiday shopping season is a critical time for online marketers and retailers. Last year, consumers spent $616.1 billion on retail purchases during November and December.1 As you might know from Google’s 5 Holiday Shopping Trends to Watch in 2015, 40 percent of that spend occurred online.2
For you, this represents a huge opportunity to reach shoppers, either while they're still researching or when they're actually ready to buy. To help you capture this opportunity, we’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays that walks through five key steps for holiday success:

  1. Prepare — Unify your data for insights and action, add more data to maximize conversions, use labels to track your promotions, and integrate offline data
  2. Automate — Use bulksheets, automated rules, and inventory-aware campaigns to make your life easier
  3. Measure — Gain valuable insights by setting up scheduled reports, budget pacing reports, formula columns, and Floodlight activity columns, then analyze and monitor your performance
  4. Optimize — Use real-time data to make adjustments with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and remarketing
  5. Plan ahead — Create executive reports, review purchase details to see how well you did this year, and save your budget pacing reports

You can also watch the recording of our recent Hangout On Air to learn tips and tools for maximizing performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
1 National Retail Federation, “Retail Holiday Sales Increase 4 Percent,” January 14, 2015.
2 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,167.

If you can’t measure it, how do you know it worked? With this simple principle in mind, we’ve been investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions like Brand Lift and Active View and partnerships with leading third parties like comScore and Nielsen on GRPs.

Viewability has long been a focus for us. Built on the foundation of our Active View technology, we launched the ability to buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network back in December 2013 and recently completed moving over the last advertiser campaigns from CPMs to viewable CPMs. We’ve worked to ensure viewability rates on YouTube are amongst the industry’s highest. And Active View now works seamlessly across video, display, mobile web and mobile apps (on YouTube and for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers), and has been adopted by over 80% of advertisers using the DoubleClick platform.

With the MRC-defined industry standard as a base-line for viewability, we are also helping advertisers and agencies go beyond transacting on the industry standard to also measure individual viewability objectives. In order to support this we have begun launching supplementary metrics in Active View, like the ability to see average viewable time and soon when an ad is 100% in view for any length in time. These are the first few in a lineup of supplementary metrics that will provide advertisers with additional data points relevant to their specific campaigns and needs.

Announcing 3rd party viewability reporting on YouTube - bringing you more choice

Today, we're continuing our approach of driving product innovation and supporting choice by announcing that we're broadening the options for advertisers measuring viewability on YouTube. Along with Active View, advertisers will also be able to choose from third party vendors.

Moat, Integral AdScience, comScore and DoubleVerify are a select set of third party vendors that have been approved to report ad viewability on YouTube, beginning with Moat in early 2016. Through these partnerships, we’ll continue to expand measurement options for marketers on YouTube, while maintaining the highest levels of security and privacy for users, advertisers and creators.
“Independent 3rd party verification is extremely important to ensuring that our clients’ media is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. As a long-time partner, IPG Mediabrands is pleased to see Google continue its work to move the industry forward on viewability by allowing independent verification of YouTube, and applaud this recent decision.”
Mitchell Weinstein, SVP Ad Operations, IPG Mediabrands

Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever added:
"Having partners like Google address these challenges helps to push the entire industry forward. This move will generate better industry-wide standards across viewability and third party verification practices and continues the momentum in the right direction."
Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever
Stay tuned for continued investments in the viewability space, including ongoing product innovation updates to Active View as well as additional partnerships. Together with our partners, our goal is to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google
Labels: ,

Mobile has changed the marketing world. Today we're launching an executive guide that shows how brands like Sephora, Virgin America, Walgreens and Home Depot are conquering that new world. It's called Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile.

Smartphones have given marketers billions of new daily moments to connect with people. Some of those moments are better for marketing than others, of course: you’re not looking for brand engagement as you post your vacation photos from Bermuda to make your friends jealous.

But there are many more moments when we all turn to our devices and welcome what brands have to say. Those are the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments when we look for answers, plan ahead and make decisions. At Google, we call these micro-moments.

In these micro-moments, consumers are often more loyal to their immediate needs than to a particular brand. In fact, 65% of smartphone users say that when searching on their smartphones, they look for the most relevant information regardless of the company providing the information.

That makes micro-moments a real land of opportunity. And there's a clear way for brands to win: Identify the moments that matter to their customers, commit to being there with relevant and useful content, and deliver frictionless experiences across devices and channels.

It's essential to be useful: only 9% of users will stay on a mobile site or app if they can't find what they want, it's too slow or it just doesn’t satisfy their needs.

Our new micro-moments guide can help your brand win the shift to mobile and crack the micro-moments code. It’s full of actionable insights to help you...
  • Be There: Anticipate the micro-moments for users in your industry, and be in place when they happen.

  • Be Useful: Be relevant to consumers’ micro-moment needs and connect them to the answers and content they’re looking for.

  • Be Quick: Deliver a fast and frictionless mobile experience.

  • Connect the Dots: Reshape your measurement strategy and teams to extract the full value of micro-moments on all screens and channels.
Download the micro-moments guide and look over the executive summary. We hope the brand studies in particular will inspire ideas for your clients’ content, campaigns and mobile site and app experiences.

Sources
1. Consumers in the Micro-Moment, Wave 3, Google/Ipsos, U.S., August 2015, n=1291 online smartphone users 18+
2. Consumers in the Micro-Moment, Wave 3, Google/Ipsos, U.S., August 2015, n=1291 online smartphone users 18+

Wherever travelers go, they're online. Whether planning a trip, navigating a new city, or sharing vacation memories, they turn to the web, using whatever device is at hand. This has completely reshaped the path to purchase, creating many moments of intent. 

Our new interactive travel dashboard uses Google data to show just when those moments happen and how travelers search. Each quarter, we'll be updating the tool to show the latest trends across the car rental, air, and hotel categories so you can plan for the season ahead.

One big trend to watch, as always, is how travelers use smartphones to plan trips. As of March 2015, mobile searches are up 32% YoY for air travel—and 39% YoY for hotels. But the data doesn't just show how people are searching—it also shows where they are looking to go. The top itinerary in summer 2014? Los Angeles to Las Vegas.



For more valuable stats and insights, explore the interactive travel dashboard on Think with Google.

As a brand trying to reach consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is critical that you understand the impact of your ads on brand metrics such as awareness and consideration.

Viewability is the starting point, an initial understanding of whether the ad had a chance to be seen. We have talked before about why measuring the viewability of advertising matters.

In December 2014, we shared insights on the state of display ad viewability across the web. As a continuation of that effort, in May we released new insights from our video ad platforms, including YouTube, to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.


We wanted to take this research a step further, by analyzing the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

To do so, we took our Brand Lift solution, which gives you insights into what impact your ads have on the consumer journey - from awareness, to ad recall, to brand interest - and tied the data to viewability metrics from our Active View technology for a set of YouTube TrueView ads. By connecting these two solutions, we were able to draw out some insights about the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

Sight, Sound and Motion Combined Drive Higher Lift

When it comes to brand metrics, ad recall is a foundation for measuring the impact of your ad. As a brand advertiser, knowing if your ad breaks through with users is a key first step to understanding the overall impact of an ad on a suite of brand metrics. In this analysis, we were able to analyze how being able to hear and see your ad affected a user’s ability to recall your ad.

Our data shows that users exposed to even one aspect of your video ad (audio or video only), exhibit significant lift in ad recall. However, the full immersive experience of sight, sound and motion delivers more ad recall than either audio or video alone. In fact, the impact on ad recall was 23% higher when users were exposed to ads with audio and video together versus ads with just audio alone.

The Longer in View, the Better You Do (on Brand Metrics)

Time in view also plays a large role when it comes to moving the needle on brand awareness and consideration. We recently introduced the ability for Active View users to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in Doubleclick Bid Manager. By connecting these measurements, we can see the relationship between viewable time and brand metrics.

We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two important brand metrics

What the Results Mean for Your Brand

These results prompt you to think about your brand advertising in a few important ways:
  • Are users viewing your creative for longer periods of time? Brand metrics continue to get higher the longer a user views your ad.
  • Are you buying the right media to have an impact on brand metrics? YouTube’s opt-in TrueView ads are uniquely suited to deliver long-form video content at scale for brand advertisers.
  • Finally, are you thinking beyond viewability to capture effectiveness metrics? You want your ads to move consumers at the moments that matter, and measuring the impact on brand metrics will make for more effective ad spend.
This is just the beginning of understanding what impacts brand metrics for video ads. As brands look to measure the effectiveness of their digital video advertising, a continued understanding of what factors drive brand metrics will be crucial to more effective brand spend.

Read further research on the impact of online video.

To read all of our research on viewability, check out thinkwithgoogle.com/viewability.

To see how viewability is measured, visit our interactive Active View demo.

Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement

We dubbed last week #HTML5Week and Google Web Designer launched multiple HTML5 resources, hangouts and product updates to help make it easier to build all your ads in HTML5. Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Google Web Designer Certification exam and training resources.

Google Web Designer helps you create engaging HTML5 content. Use animations and interactive elements to bring your creative vision to life and enjoy integrations with other Google products, including a shared asset library and one-click-to-publish integration with DoubleClick Studio, compatibility with AdWords, and the ability to collaborate on works-in-progress in Google Drive.

The new Google Web Designer Fundamentals certification allows users to demonstrate proficiency and understanding of the Google Web Designer interface and features. You'll learn:
- The Google Web Designer interface
- How to create templates and animations
- How to build interstitial ads
- How to build advanced expandable ads

The program consists of a </span>step-by-step eLearning takes you through the basics of Google Web Designer and helps you get trained quickly in building HTML5 ads using the tool. Once you finish the eLearning and build a few test ads, you can take a certification exam to test your knowledge and demonstrate your proficiency. If you pass the certification, you can get your name listed on the Certified Users list in the Rich Media Gallery.

We hope this new certification exam helps you learn the ins and outs of the Google Web Designer tool, so that you can more easily create your HTML5 ads.
Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick and Google Web Designer

Today, our lives are lived in moments. We share vacation photos with family and check in on what our friends are up to. There are also other types of moments: the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments. These moments, when we act on a specific intent and expect an immediate answer, happen all the time and all along the consumer decision journey. And they’re increasingly happening on digital platforms.
As we are now able to immediately act on our impulses to answer a question, learn a skill or find the best product for us, the link between our action and our intent has never been closer. The challenge for marketers is to quickly aggregate all of the intent behind these moments into something meaningful, some sense of understanding what consumers truly desire.
Enter Google. Google has the innovative technologies to turn this massive data set into data that can help people create new services and solve big problems.


Even with the biggest of data sets, it’s hard to engineer an insight.  Google provides the factbase of category, consumer, brand, and content data from which just about anyone can find something interesting. But in the hands of experts – the brand managers, planners and creatives of the world – your expertise can turn our findings into true insights. When we can put our data and our tools into your hands, truly groundbreaking work is possible.
Google.com/Insights: A centralized location for Google’s insights tools
To help you better harness the power of our data, we have redesigned Google.com/insights as a central starting point for the insights discovery process.  Here, you can understand how our solutions help you to understand the intent behind the moments that matter:    
  • Google Consumer Surveys: make confident business decisions with fast, accurate, and insightful market research
  • Google Trends: Anticipate industry trends before they happen, with real-time insights into search behavior
  • Google Correlate: See how seasonality, location, and world events affect search behavior relevant to your industry
In addition, you will find links to compelling, research-driven insights we have published so far, as well as examples on how other brands have partnered with Google and used our data and tools to successfully drive their businesses forward.

Companies of all sizes and across all industries rely on our data and tools to discover how to find solutions to problems and understand what moves consumers.  Today and tomorrow, Google will be there to partner with marketers to help solve their most challenging questions.

YouTube recently celebrated its 10th birthday, and with this milestone in mind we reflected on how YouTube has become a daily part of the lives of millions of people. Communities, both small and large, explore their passions on YouTube. Car buyers check out potential purchases with in-action auto videos, gamers discover the latest games through a deep library of trailers, and new moms gain insights around parenting from both brands and mommy vloggers. 

Ten years in, YouTube is a daily go-to destination for people who seek to connect with others around their passions and interests. In a recent survey of 18-34 year old millennials, YouTube was most chosen out of their top 3 favorite video destinations to watch online videos.1 Statistics like this show why YouTube is growing faster than it has in years—watch time is up 60% across devices, and 100% on mobile year over year.2

Viewers are also coming to YouTube specifically to watch content from brands. In fact, four of the top 10 trending videos on all of YouTube in 2014 were created by brands.3 We recently partnered with Pixability to analyze viewership and publishing trends from the Top 100 Brands as defined by the Interbrand 2014 Best Global Brands ranking. 

Viewership of brand content is growing
Brands are seeing an explosion of engagement and views on YouTube. Views of branded content of the top 100 brands have nearly doubled in the last 12 months: consumers have watched their videos more than 40B times in total,4 with over 18B of those views taking place in the last year.5 And brands are building sustained relationships with their viewers on YouTube: brand channel subscriptions are up 47% year over year.6  Brands like Toyota have experienced this engagement growth firsthand:   

“The benefit of a diverse platform like YouTube is they have an unparalleled ability to reach a variety of demographics,” says Dionne Colvin-Lovely, Director, Traditional & New Media, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. “That aligns very well with Toyota’s diverse consumer and product lineup. YouTube allows our brand’s message to break through in an impactful way, and it offers great metrics to see if the content is resonating with the intended audience.”

Brands are becoming more active on YouTube
Brands are now adopting similar content strategies as some of our most successful creators on YouTube. They’re actively managing their YouTube channels, and publishing new content on a regular basis to engage viewers and keep them coming back. According to Pixability, the Interbrand Top 100 brands are collectively uploading a video to YouTube every 18.5 minutes.7 Also a fun fact: Thursday is the most popular day for uploads.8 

In terms of content, 10% of brand videos posted to YouTube in the last year are over 10 minutes long.9 This indicates that brands are creating made-for-YouTube content, which tends to perform better than repurposed material. Brands are realizing if they have an authentic voice, they can engage people familiar with their brand and also attract new customers. Coca-Cola is also using YouTube as a platform on which to build relationships and engage consumers with unique, relevant content:

“We love the opportunity YouTube gives Coca-Cola to interact, build relationships and share stories that are authentic and relevant to the brand,” said Chris Bigda, Director, Connections Planning & Investment, Coca-Cola North America. “We are seeing continued success on the platform, uploading higher quality content and achieving better results for it. We are really proud to be part of the YouTube community and excited by the partnership.”

Screen Shot 2015-07-17 at 11.41.28 AM.png

Wayfair, for example, is using YouTube to experiment with new content and reach untapped demographics:

“YouTube has become an incredibly valuable marketing tool for Wayfair by providing us with a platform to deliver new and authentic content to our customers. It's exciting to see that we're also reaching new audiences for our portfolio of brands,” said Ben Young, Media Manager- Wayfair TV and Video. “Despite our success to date, it feels like we’ve only just scratched the surface with the YouTube platform.” 

Brands are investing more on YouTube
In addition to brands creating more content for YouTube, we’re also seeing that brands are investing more in video ads to promote this content. The average spend of the top 100 video advertisers, as defined by media spend, is up 60%,10 and the number of advertisers investing in video ads is up 40% year over year.11  By investing in YouTube, these advertisers aren’t just building their brand, they’re also contributing to the YouTube ecosystem.

These first 10 years are just the beginning—we’re looking forward to seeing how brands will continue to evolve and innovate on YouTube over the next 10.

Posted by Cenk Bulbul, Head of Strategy and Insights, YouTube Ads Marketing and Sheyna Ezrapour, Brand Ads Marketing

Sources
1. BAVC Consulting & YouTube Marketing, Custom Survey Study Millennials (150 18-34 year olds), US data July 2015
2. YouTube Global Data, Q2 2015 compared to Q2 2014
3. YouTube Trends Data, 2014
4. Top 100 Brands Pixability research, all time global data (2005-2015)
5. Top 100 Brands Pixability research, June 2014 to June 2015
6. Top 100 Brands Pixability research, Jan to June 2014 and Jan to June 2015
7. Top 100 Brands Pixability research, Jan to June 2015
8. Top 100 Brands Pixability research, all time global data (2005-2015)
9. Top 100 Brands Pixability research, global data June 2014 to June 2015
10. Google Global Data, April to June 2014 and April to June 2015, Top 100 advertisers list determined by media spend.
11. Google Global Data, April to June 2014 and April to June 2015

Making it easier to deliver compelling experiences across screens
We’ve explained how Programmatic Guaranteed in DoubleClick Bid Manager and Native Ads in DoubleClick for Publishers help ensure your brand shows up in the right place and context. But once you’re present, you have to show a relevant, engaging message to each viewer. Today, we’re excited to launch three new mobile video formats for DoubleClick and a new Creative Preview App, to make it easier to deliver compelling experiences across screens.
Bring interactive video to mobile devices: Video Cue Points component in Google Web Designer
The Video Cue Points component, now available for download, allows developers to build an interactive video ad that looks and feels like VPAID, except that the video runs directly within the display ad on mobile devices. Interactive HTML5 banners with video might take 2-3 weeks of developer time to hand code, but with Google Web Designer and our Video Cue Points component, it can take as little as 3-4 hours.

“Teaser Reels” mobile video component in DoubleClick Studio
With Teaser Reels, you can easily create an HTML5 display ad with an autoplay video teaser. Imagine an interstitial between game levels or directly within mobile web content - a user sees the teaser video automatically and then can click to play the entire video on their device. This will be launching in mid-July, so check back on our help center for more details. (Studio login required)
New mobile in-app templates in Google Web Designer
Our mobile starter templates make it easy to create rich in-app experiences, such as this expandable HTML5 video unit, built by the creative agency Think Jam to promote the release of Warner Brother’s Hobbit film. Learn more about Google Web Designer templates here.

The new Creative Preview App
Once you've built ads specifically designed for mobile, you'll want to preview them across device types to ensure the user experience is positive in every environment and size. We’ve launched the Creative Preview App, now available for Google Play and coming soon to iOS, which allows you to push mobile ads from DoubleClick Studio directly to your mobile device. Now you can preview and test mobile ads in an actual mobile environment. You can also test the exits in your ads to see reporting metrics come through in the DoubleClick Studio output console on your desktop.
We’re working to make the process of building rich, engaging ads for every environment more seamless for brands and agencies, from creative authoring through to delivering the right ad to the right customer at the right time.

Posted by Karin Hennessy, Product Manager, DoubleClick Creative Solutions

At Cannes Lions this week, thousands of creatives are gathering to discuss innovative storytelling, ad technology, and the future of the marketing industry. Whether you’re there or just following along from home (#CannesLions), the latest pieces on Think with Google can get your creative juices flowing.

Here’s the big question we’ve been trying to answer for creative marketers: In the age of the skip button, how can we make ads unskippable? On YouTube, advertisers need to grab a viewer’s attention instantly—and then hold it after the first five seconds. With our new research, we tried to find out just how to do that. While there is no exact formula, we found that science could tell us quite a bit about engaging video advertising.

For our Unskippable Labs experiment, we tested 3 cuts of the same ad to see which version got the best reaction on smartphones. This experiment helped us uncover some key insights about what creative works on mobile. One particularly interesting learning: shorter doesn’t necessarily mean better. The longest ad in our study (93 seconds) received the highest view-through rate.



For a more macro approach, our latest YouTube Insights piece looked at thousands of ads across 16 countries and 11 verticals, to try and find out what creative elements are associated with how long viewers watch (and how much they remember). The little things—like where you put your brand logo, and what tone you take in the first 5 seconds—can go a long way in helping viewership, brand awareness, and ad recall.

Looking for some examples of attention-grabbing ads? The Cannes to Cannes YouTube Ads Leaderboard recaps the top 10 videos since last year’s festival! And for even more big ideas and creative inspiration, be sure to check out our brand new Creative hub on Think with Google.