Create with Google: Inspiration, Resources, And Tools To Fuel Your Next Big Idea

The case for creativity has never been greater. Big thinking and bold ideas are in high demand, and creative execution is consistently confirmed as the largest contributor to driving sales. And as we see from the brands we partner with, success occurs when data and technology inspire creativity.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are more platforms, more signals, and more data sources informing creative than ever before. We want our clients and partners to grow and thrive on our platforms, and that’s why we’ve made it a priority to invest in resources and tools to support creative makers and agencies at every stage of the creative process.

This year at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, we’re expanding a new resource for the global creative community: Create with Google. Made for creatives by creatives, this platform is designed to inspire, inform and enable creative makers from ideation to execution. The global site is currently available in English, Spanish, Korean and Japanese, with a plan to expand to more languages throughout the year.

Get inspired for your next big campaign

We’ve searched the globe to find the most innovative, intelligent, and imaginative work across Google’s creative canvas. Filter by format, vertical, and platform, or search by keyword to inspire your creative thinking.

Master Google’s platforms, formats and tools

Read up on a range of resources and get insider tips on how to build work across Google’s creative canvas—from ARCore to Display and YouTube Director Mix.

Access tools to support your idea, from pitch to production

Two new tools, Audience Connect and YouTube Mockup Tool, make it easier for you to create and sell in work on our platforms—from pitching in concepts right through production.

Audience Connect transforms creative presentations from broadcast into a conversation, by tracking client engagement in response to any video. When pitching in a TrueView concept, for example, the tool provides real-time feedback on when your audience is more leaned in and when they would skip.

YouTube Mockup Tool lets you upload and showcase work to clients and colleagues in an authentic YouTube environment, simulating your creativity across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

We want to champion and challenge creative makers to experiment and make better work, recognizing we only succeed when our partners do. We hope Create with Google can become a genuine global community where the industry comes together to find the inspiration, resources and tools for their next project.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

App Campaigns Make Their Landing: Introducing A Simpler Name For Google’s App Ad Solution

People reach for their mobile phones throughout the day for help getting things done. And it’s often a mobile app that delivers what they need—whether it’s a new pair of rain boots or a puzzle game to pass the time during a commute.

Universal App campaigns help connect your app with more of these app-happy consumers. Today, we are simplifying the name of “Universal App campaigns” to “App campaigns.” This move will not affect campaign features or functionality, and there’s no action required for existing app promotion customers.

App campaigns will join Search, Display, Video, Shopping and Smart as the top-level campaign names available in Google Ads.

App campaigns use Google’s machine learning technology to help you find the users that matter most to you, based on your defined business goals—across Google Search, Play, YouTube, and over three million sites and apps—all from one campaign.

To date, App campaigns have delivered unprecedented results for the developer community—helping drive more than 17 billion app installs, according to Google Internal data from 2019. We hope this more direct name will help advertisers and developers get started with Google Ads and select the right campaign type for their business goals.

You’ll start to see these changes roll out over the next month. We’ll talk more about this change—and other new App ad innovations—at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in mid-March. We hope to see you there!

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

How Evolving User Patterns Drive New Ad Experiences On YouTube

At YouTube, we’re on a constant quest to give people the perfect viewing experience. But over the years, what that looks like has changed significantly.

The way we watch video is always changing. And we want to keep advertisers abreast of these trends, with new ad experiences molded to the new ways people watch. This was the spirit behind our introduction of six-second bumper ads more than two years ago–as a response to the increasingly mobile habits of our users.

Today we’re highlighting how we’re adapting to three new trends in the user experience.

Longer viewing sessions

Our recent user experience research suggests that in addition to factors such as the length of ads, viewers are quite sensitive to the frequency of ad breaks, especially during longer viewing sessions. Through this research, we also learned that fewer interruptions is correlated with better user metrics, including less abandonment of content and higher rates of ad viewing. To respond to this, we will begin testing ad pods–two ads stacked back to back, where viewers have the option to skip directly to the content if it’s not the right ad for them.

Why does this solution make sense? Because when users see two ads in a break, they’re less likely to be interrupted by ads later. In fact, those users will experience up to 40 percent fewer interruptions by ads in the session.1 Early experiment results also show an 8-11 percent increase in unique reach and a 5-10 percent increase in frequency for advertisers, with no impact on Brand Lift metrics.2 This new experience, launching on desktop this year then followed by mobile and TV screens, aims to accommodate viewer preferences while continuing to help advertisers connect with their most important audiences.

More self-directed discovery

The way users prefer to find videos to watch is also changing. Remember back when the only YouTube videos you’d watch came in the form of a shared URL from a friend? Over the years, video viewing on YouTube has become more self-directed, as more viewers than ever before hop into their home or trending feeds and scroll to find a recommended video. In fact, over the last three years, watch time from content users discover on the YouTube homepage has grown 10X.3 That’s why we brought TrueView video discovery ads to the YouTube home feed, along with the Masthead and Universal App campaign ads. The YouTube home feed continues to be a great place for users to discover their next favorite creator, and now it can be a great place for them to discover your brand.

Watching on TV screens

We’re seeing incredible watchtime growth on TV screens: on average, users watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day.4  Last month, we introduced the TV screen device type in Google Ads and Display & Video 360, allowing you to tailor your campaigns for connected TVs – for example, by using a different creative or setting a specific device bid adjustment – and see reporting for ads that run on TV screens.

In the face of these burgeoning user trends—as well as the next wave, and the next—we’ll continue working to build the ideal video viewing experience, and keep thinking up ways to deliver value for our advertiser partners.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Protecting What We Love About The Internet: Our Efforts To Stop Online Piracy

The internet has enabled people worldwide to connect, create and distribute new works of art like never before. A key part of preserving this creative economy is ensuring creators and artists have a way to share and make money from their content—and preventing the flow of money to those who seek to pirate that content. Today, we’re releasing our latest update on those efforts.

Our 2018 “How Google Fights Piracy” report explains the programs, policies, and technology we put in place to combat piracy online and ensure continued opportunities for creators around the world.

We invest significantly in the technology, tools and resources that prevent copyright infringement on our platforms. We also work with others across the industry on efforts to combat piracy. These efforts appear to be having an effect: around the world, online piracy has been decreasing, while spending on legitimate content is rising across content categories.

Here are a few of our findings from this year’s Piracy report:

  • $3 billion+:The amount YouTube has paid to rights holders who have monetized use of their content in other videos through Content ID, our industry-leading rights management tool.
  • $100 million+: The amount we’ve invested in building Content ID, including staffing and computing resources.
  • $1.8 billion+The amount YouTube paid to the music industry from October 2017 to September 2018 in advertising revenue alone
  • 3 billion+:The number of URLs that were removed from Search for infringing copyright since launching a submission tool for copyright owners and their agents.
  • 10 million+The number of ads that were disapproved by Google in 2017 that were suspected of copyright infringement or that linked to infringing sites.

As we continue our work in the years ahead, five principles guide our substantial investments in fighting piracy:

Create more and better legitimate alternatives: Piracy often arises when it’s difficult for consumers to access legitimate content. By developing products that make it easy for users to access legitimate content, like Google Play Music and YouTube, Google helps drive revenue for creative industries and give consumers choice.

Follow the money: As the vast majority of sites dedicated to online piracy are doing so to make money, one way to combat them is to cut off their supply. We prevent actors that engage in copyright infringement from using our ads and monetization systems and we enforce these policies rigorously.

Be efficient, effective, and scalable: We strive to implement anti-piracy solutions that work at scale. For example, as early as 2010, we began making substantial investments in streamlining the copyright removal process for search results. As a result, these improved procedures allow us to process copyright removal requests for search results at the rate of millions per week.

Guard against abuse: Some actors will make false copyright infringement claims in order to have content they don’t want online taken down. We’re committed to detecting and rejecting bogus infringement allegations, such as removals for political or competitive reasons.

Provide transparency: We’re committed to providing transparency. In our Transparency Report, we disclose the number of requests we receive from copyright owners and governments to remove information from our services.

Today, our services are generating more revenue for creators and rights holders, connecting more people with the content they love, and doing more to fight back against online piracy than ever before. We’re proud of the progress this report represents. Through continued innovation and partnership, we’re committed to curtailing infringement by bad actors while empowering the creative communities who make many of the things we love about the internet today.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

New MRC Accreditations And Partners For Google And YouTube Ads Measurement

Is my marketing working? It sounds like a simple question, but in today’s complex environment, answering it correctly is a challenge. To help advance advertising measurement, we’ve invested in third-party accreditations through the Media Rating Council (MRC), and partnerships with leading measurement technology providers. Together, these efforts help ensure that the metrics our advertising solutions deliver are trusted, align with industry standards, and can be compared across providers.

Today, we’re announcing new MRC accreditations across Google advertising products, including Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform (specifically Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager), and Google Ad Manager.1

We’ve also made progress with Google Measurement Partners for viewability, brand safety, and reach reporting on YouTube.

Trusted metrics across Google’s advertising solutions

Advertisers consistently tell us that they struggle with comparing media placements to determine where to invest their limited marketing resources. It’s a problem that’s made even worse when media providers use different definitions of commonly accepted metrics like clicks, impressions, and viewable impressions.

By endorsing the MRC standards and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines for media measurement, we stand on the side of marketers, who deserve transparency and fairness in their media buys.

Below, you’ll see the comprehensive list of MRC accreditations we currently maintain across search, display, and video ads on the web and in apps. Accredited metrics include various aspects of our clicks, served impressions, viewable impressions, and invalid traffic detection and filtration. 

With today’s announcements, YouTube video ad impressions and viewability metrics for desktop, mobile web, and mobile in-app are now fully MRC accredited in Google Ads, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager. And we’ve begun the audit process for MRC accreditation of recently added metrics, including brand safety and Unique Reach reporting on YouTube in Google Ads.

“Google has consistently demonstrated a commitment to helping advertisers and publishers achieve transparency and quality in measurement through its work with the MRC. In addition to submitting products for initial consideration for MRC accreditation, Google also has expanded on the scope of what’s being submitted for existing accredited products. This progress is emblematic of what we at MRC consider to be our core industry mission: to help lift the bar for quality in measurement consistently upward.”

—George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, Media Rating Council

“Google’s efforts to create transparency and choice through MRC accreditation demonstrates their commitment to delivering a better, more responsible advertising ecosystem. The ultimate goal is to ensure transparency at every step in the complex advertising supply chain, and Google’s efforts are helping us achieve that objective.”

—Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA

More transparent YouTube measurement with trusted partners

To help advertisers measure YouTube media in a verified, privacy-safe way with the measurement solution of their choice, we’ve also made progress with Google Measurement Partners for viewability, brand safety, and reach reporting.

First, the YouTube data feed for video viewability reporting by third-parties is currently under audit by the MRC. Our ultimate goal is to achieve MRC accreditation for our integrations with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), so advertisers can be confident that YouTube metrics have been third-party verified, no matter where they choose to measure.

In addition, brand safety verification on YouTube by both DoubleVerify and IAS is now in expanded beta. In beta tests with DoubleVerify and IAS, we’re seeing 99 percent success rates on brand safety across both auction and reserve, including Google Preferred.2

We’re also expanding our partnerships for reach measurement, which now include Nielsen, comScore, Kantar, and soon, Meetrics. This month, YouTube’s integration with Nielsen for mobile in-app measurement has expanded to Australia and Italy. This is in addition to the U.S., Canada, Japan, U.K., Germany, and France which are already available.

To know if their marketing is working, advertisers need access to accurate, timely metrics they can trust, regardless of which measurement provider they choose. Looking to the future, we’ll continue investing in measurement solutions and partnerships that help advertisers understand and compare the impact of their investments using commonly accepted metrics and standards.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

A New Video Format To Reach People Across The Mobile Web And Apps

Over the last year, we’ve been working on a way to extend the reach of your video campaigns to people beyond YouTube, especially as they spend more and more time interacting with apps and sites on their mobile devices. Starting today, you can use out-stream video ads, a new format built exclusively for mobile environments, to reach more potential customers with your video creativity.

Outstream ads drive incremental, cost-efficient and viewable reach beyond YouTube. Ads show on Google video partners, which are high-quality publisher websites and mobile apps where you can show video ads, including TrueView in-stream and Bumper ads. When outstream video ads come into view on a mobile screen, they begin to play with sound off. After that, a user can tap the ad to turn sound on and restart the video from the beginning, or simply keep scrolling.

In every context, an ad needs the opportunity to be seen in order to drive impact, which is why our outstream video ads are charged on viewable CPM. This means that every impression you pay for has been on screen and viewable (as measured by MRC standards). In addition to Active View and unique reach reporting, you can use brand interest lift to measure incremental interest in your brand or product as assessed by an increase in organic searches on Google.com or YouTube.

Outstream video ads complement our efficient reach solutions for YouTube: TrueView for reach and Bumper ads. Now, you can reach even more of your audience across the mobile web and apps with a video ad designed for the ways people read, play, swipe, and scroll on mobile.

Advertisers like Hong Kong Tourism board are already using out-stream video ads to increase awareness and cost-efficient reach. Tina Chao, General Manager, Marketing, says, “To build awareness for Hong Kong as a travel destination, the Hong Kong Tourism Board used out-stream video ads to reach a broad set of potential travelers across Asia. Outstream video ads delivered strong results for our global brand campaign: 30% incremental reach with a 40% lower cost per completed video view and 85% lower CPM.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Bring More Foot Traffic To Your Business With YouTube And Display Ads

This year, around 90% of global sales will happen in a physical store.1 To bring more shoppers through the door, businesses need tools to efficiently reach nearby consumers and measure their campaign performance across channels. That’s why we introduced store visits measurement back in 2014. Since then, businesses around the world have measured over 7 billion store visits in AdWords.

Unlock offline results with YouTube

As we shared at Shoptalk Europe today, location extensions and store visits measurement are now available on YouTube. With YouTube’s first-ever ad extensions for TrueView in-stream and bumper ads, you can influence viewers to engage with your brand offline and drive more visits and in-store purchases. People watching your videos will see your address, directions, and business hours—right in the ad. You can then use store visits measurement to see how your video campaigns drive foot traffic and measure their performance against other online and traditional marketing channels, like television, print, and radio ads.

Says Darrin Kellaris, Executive Director, Marketing at IHOP, “Video has been an integral part of our digital strategy to optimize guest interactions online with relevant and distinctive content. We were happy to partner with Google to find new ways to measure the full value of our video campaigns. Through Google’s store visits solution, we gained useful consumer insights that helped us drive visits from YouTube for less than $1 per guest. Insights like this have given us an innovative way to measure business impact beyond standard brand metrics and to understand how video helps drive lower-funnel actions. This is something we’d like to see become more prevalent across all media partners.”

Jerome’s Furniture has included store visits in their Search measurement and optimization since 2015. It is now using location extensions and store visits for YouTube to drive more customers into stores and understand offline performance across channels. YouTube has proven to send qualified visits to our stores at a very efficient cost. The visibility into YouTube’s impact on store visits has opened our eyes and our investment in YouTube advertising has risen, dramaticallyScott Perry
Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing

Elgiganten, a Swedish electronics retailer, turned to video to help drive its omnichannel marketing strategy. After the first half of 2017, the company found that its video campaigns brought 6-10% of users who viewed its ad on YouTube to its stores. Overall, the brand has seen an 8.8% increase in its sales, and learned that its mobile search traffic delivers a 21% higher return on ad spend on mobile phones versus desktop. We can see which products are more likely to drive people to the store rather than buying online, and how people who are close to a retail location and using a mobile device are more likely to visit the storeNiko Niva
Digital Specialist at Elgiganten

Engage local consumers on sites and apps across the GDN

Earlier this year, we fully rolled out location extensions and store visits measurement to campaigns on the Google Display Network (GDN). Now, you can reach more nearby customers when they’re ready to buy and get a better understanding of your offline performance across channels. Advertisers large and small across industries have seen success using display ads to drive customers to their physical businesses—even those who usually depend on traditional offline campaigns, like catalog and circular ads.

Lawson, a convenience store chain with nearly 15,000 stores globally, was the first advertiser in Japan to use store visits to measure the full value of its display ads. Historically, the company focused most of its advertising on offline campaigns. After testing store visits for Display, the brand learned that mobile ads were more effective and cost-efficient at driving foot traffic to their stores, saving them 45% more in costs per visit compared to desktop and tablet ads. Understanding how effective our mobile display ads are and the profiles of the customers visiting our stores after seeing our online ads is a huge step forward for our business. This helps us better cater to customer needs and optimize our marketing

The Home Depot Canada, Canada’s leading home improvement retailer, used store visits insights to learn that 18% of people who clicked on its display ads visited a store within 30 days. It also discovered that 50% of these customers made an average in-store purchase of $65 Canadian dollars.This is valuable data, and we look forward to relying on store visits insights like this to help us keep driving our online to offline marketing strategy

In the coming weeks, we’ll also begin introducing more local ad formats powered by location extensions to help people find the products they’re interested in at nearby businesses. To start, we’ll be rolling out affiliate location extensions for display ads, which allow manufacturing brands to show which retail chains sell their products.

If you’re focused on engaging omnichannel customers, you can now use location extensions and store visits measurement across Video, Display, Search, and Shopping to drive more visitors to your business offline.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Find More Of Your “Star” Customers With Universal App Campaigns

We recently announced that we’ll be moving all AdWords app install campaigns to Universal App Campaigns (UAC). Starting on October 16th, all new app install campaigns created in AdWords will run on UAC. Existing Search, Display, and YouTube app promo campaigns will stop running on November 15th, so it’s important to start upgrading to UAC as soon as possible.

Check out our UAC best practices for more tips on creatives, bidding strategies and conversion tracking options.

How UAC helps you find the customers that matter most

UAC uses Google’s unique machine learning technology to help find your “star” customers based on business goals you define like signing up for a free trial or even making a purchase — across Google’s largest properties like Google Search, Google Play, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.

Advertisers across the world and in different industries have found more of their best customers with UAC. Here are some of their stories.

STARZ is the second-largest premium content provider in the U.S. that features movies and original TV series. Alison Hoffman, Chief Marketing Officer, says “A new slate of STARZ customers now use our mobile app to watch their favorite shows and movies. STARZ partnered with Google to support the new seasons of our hit series Power and Outlander. (We) used Universal App Campaigns to drive potential fans to sign up for the STARZ mobile app … Universal App Campaigns helped STARZ nearly double the number of fans found through Google.”

Viber is a free messaging and calling app owned by Japanese online retailer Rakuten Inc. Viber’s growth team used UAC for Actions to acquire users with a 21% higher retention rate. “Using Universal App Campaigns with action optimization helped us acquire more high-quality users with better budget utilization. It allowed us to directly optimize our campaign for our business goal, which is to acquire loyal users,” says Moshi Blum, Head of User Acquisition.

Looking for more balance and mindfulness? Then the personalized meditation training and guidance in the Headspace app may be for you. Universal App Campaigns makes it easier for Headspace to improve the health and happiness of the world. According to Head of Growth, Robert Lamvik, “Headspace has a small, yet ambitious team, so we partnered with Google and use UAC to create more scalable campaign activity that brings us higher quality users. What’s great is that UAC finds people likely to take the actions we care about — like starting a meditation session or subscribing.”

Looking for more balance and mindfulness? Then the personalized meditation training and guidance in the Headspace app may be for you. Universal App Campaigns make it easier for Headspace to improve the health and happiness of the world. According to Head of Growth, Robert Lamvik, “Headspace has a small, yet ambitious team, so we partnered with Google and use UAC to create more scalable campaign activity that brings us higher quality users. What’s great is that UAC finds people likely to take the actions we care about — like starting a meditation session or subscribing.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Know Their Intention, Get Their Attention: New Ways To Connect And Measure On YouTube

We look at our phones while we watch TV. We watch TV on our phones while we walk to work. We work on our laptops while we cast a video to a set-top box. We spend the majority of our days connected, often via multiple devices—so much so that reach has become a commodity in advertising. And while reach is plentiful, attention is scarce.

Unless we’re talking about online video. Our latest research with Ipsos suggests people are 3x more likely to pay attention to online video ads vs. television ads.1 And within online video, people pay nearly 2x more attention to video ads on YouTube than they do on other social media.2 That’s because on YouTube, ads are more likely to be seen and people are more likely to arrive with intent to watch video—2X more likely than other online platforms.3 Today we’re sharing four new tools to help you capture the attention of your audience on YouTube:

1) Helping brands reach the right audiences

Intention is what has made search advertising so effective—the ability to quickly connect people looking for something they want or need, with a business that offers just that. Since January we’ve seen that what’s worked great for search works great for video as well. We found that campaigns that use intent-based audiences on mobile have 20 percent higher ad recall lift and 50 percent higher brand awareness lift relative to campaigns that only use demographic audiences.4

In order to help you deliver more relevant, useful ads on YouTube, we’re expanding the ways you can use Google’s broad ecosystem using Custom Affinity Audiences to reach people based on the kind of searches they do, or the kind of places and apps they like. That means an outdoor outfitter could use Custom Affinity audiences to potentially reach people who have searched for skis, spent time at ski resorts, or have downloaded a ski resort’s trail guide app.

2) Enabling custom creative at scale

Custom audiences are most valuable when paired with creative that is relevant to them. But personalization at scale can be difficult—new video creative is pricey and takes time to make.

We’re launching Director Mix to simplify the process of creating different versions of the same creative tailored for each audience—you give us the building blocks of your video ad, like different voiceovers, background and copy, and our system will create thousands of versions to match your various audience segments.

Campbell’s Soup used Director Mix to create videos with clever copy based on the content people were about to watch. For instance if you clicked to watch clips from Orange is the New Black, you’d see a bumper asking “does your cooking make prison food seem good? We’ve got a soup for that.” And it worked: Campbell’s earned a 55 percent lift in sales and a 24 percent lift in ad recall with this campaign.

3) Telling a story that breaks free of a single unit

Similarly, we’re introducing Video Ad Sequencing to help you architect an ad experience that unfolds over time. This new feature in AdWords Labs lets you string together ad creative. You can pivot, you can react—and you can take consumers down a different path depending on which ads are working for them.

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.

To drum up excitement for their new Assassin’s Creed game, Ubisoft cut four sequential six-second bumper ads, each with a critical element of their longer trailer. The brand used Affinity Audiences and Video Ad Sequencing to serve the ads to core E3 audiences. The campaign reached almost 15 million unique viewers and resulted in best-in-class lifts in awareness (+25 percent), search lift for “Assassin’s Creed” (+224 percent) and search lift for the Assassin’s Creed trailer (+375 percent).

4) Measuring the impact—New ways to measure sales lift

And finally, you need a way to measure that you earned attention—and one way to do that is to look at its effect on offline sales.

We’re rolling out a new, global approach to measuring sales lift with Nielsen MPA (Matched Panel Analysis). This geo-based solution offers a fast, media-agnostic way to determine which online ads drive offline sales. With this implementation of Nielsen MPA, CPG clients can measure video alongside other Google media.

From looking at the Nielsen MPA studies we’ve run to-date, we found that YouTube drove sales lift for the advertised product in 14 of 19 studies globally.5

We’ve also expanded our Oracle Datalogix ROI offering in the U.S. to include six-second bumper ads so that brands can more comprehensively measure their YouTube campaigns. And we’ll continue working to deliver more solutions to complement our Nielsen MPA, Oracle DLX ROI, MMM and store visit offerings today, so you’ll have the measurement that works best for your business.

At YouTube, our aim is to show ads that are relevant and useful, so that instead of interrupting people’s viewing experiences, you’re enhancing them. This means matching what advertisers have to offer with what people are interested in—leading to a better YouTube experience backed up by comprehensive user controls. We hope you try out these new features as they become available, and hope to see you at Advertising Week.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Say It In Six: Why Marketers And Creatives Are Embracing The Newest Video Ad Length

Have you heard the good news about YouTube’s six-second bumper ads? These little wonders have swept the globe for three simple reasons: they provide wide reach, they drive brand results and they’re a great canvas for creativity.

And we’re ready to mark the one year anniversary of bumpers by giving them their star turn – for the 2017-2018 upfront season, we’re making bumpers available for Google Preferred buys. This format is a perfect match to the sought-after content included in Google Preferred and will help advertisers drive reach and build awareness during increasingly mobile viewing moments.

Let’s take a closer look at this little format that could, built to capture attention wherever and whenever it’s available.

Bumpers drive efficient reach

Sold on a simple CPM, bumpers aren’t just an easy way to get your brand in front of a lot of people – they also effectively drive upper funnel results. We looked across 122 bumpers campaigns in the US last year and found that 70% drove a significant lift in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%.1 On ad recall, they perform even better – over 9 in 10 drove ad recall globally, with an average lift of over 30%.2 Given their high success rate and ease of use, bumpers can be a great building block for your YouTube campaigns.

Bumpers work for brands

Thanks to their efficiency and efficacy, many brands are weaving bumpers into their campaigns. For instance, Busch used bumpers to continue the story from their first-ever Super Bowl ad. Busch worked with their creative agency Deutsch to collect extra footage from their Super Bowl shoot and create bumpers with different themes. This approach resulted in a double-digit lift in both purchase consideration and brand awareness among viewers. Knowing how well its bumpers performed across various brand lift metrics, Busch was also able to optimize its campaign in real-time, tailoring its creatives to audience segments most likely to consider buying the beer after seeing a particular ad. As Anheuser-Busch’s Senior Director, Digital Victoria Vaynberg points out, “Capturing consumers’ attention is always a challenge, so short and contextually-relevant content is key to getting over this hurdle. By using YouTube bumpers, we were able to tap into a great product that is built to address this challenge and successfully break through with consumers.”

Under Armour also turned to bumpers for a recent product launch. They took a strategic hybrid approach for advertising on YouTube, leading with a TrueView ad, which helped to engage the audience through an emotional narrative, followed by bumpers that highlighted the innovation of the new product.

“Under Armour is committed to making all athletes better through performance and innovation, while inspiring the next generation of athletes with powerful storytelling,” said Jim Mollica, Vice President of Consumer Engagement at Under Armour. “Our forward-thinking strategy guided our athletes through a unique engagement funnel, which was evidenced by double the lift in product interest among people who saw our YouTube bumper ad and our TrueView ad combined, compared to those who only saw our TrueView ad.”

We’ve also seen strong results in third party studies when using a comparable approach to Under Armour’s – using bumpers to remarket to TrueView views produced a significantly higher lift in ad recall vs TrueView alone, with an average higher lift of 42% for the skipped views and 104% for the paid views.3 We’re excited to see other brands follow a similar playbook, orchestrating their storytelling across ad lengths to maximize results.”

Bumpers offer a great canvas for creativity

It’s no surprise that some of bumpers’ earliest fans have come from the creative community. Part of the reason bumpers are such a fertile format for storytelling is that creativity thrives in constraint. At SXSW, we challenged artists, filmmakers and agency creatives to re-imagine classic works of literature in six seconds – effectively re-telling these stories in miniature. The results were by turns evocative, funny, poignant and beautiful, and they showed that six seconds is a natural and adaptable ad length. For more insights into how to build bumpers that work, check out our new article “Success in Six” on Think with Google.

For more information on bumpers, including how to set up a campaign, check out the Help Center, and don’t forget to #bumpitup.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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