>> ALI: Hi, I’m Ali Miller from the YouTube Ads product team.
I really wish we could be together today in person
as I always enjoy the opportunity to connect with our customers.
But the last year has brought on a world of change.
Some changes we’ll be very happy to leave behind, and some changes we’ll keep as our new normal.
This is definitely true when I look at my own habits!
My dog, Lucy, has been a much-needed source of fun during the pandemic.
But Lucy will always tell you she’s hungry!
To cut down on trips out of the house, I started ordering Lucy’s food online.
We found a local store that offers a discount for recurring delivery,
making it both convenient and a great deal.
I don’t expect I’ll be cancelling that subscription any time soon!
And I’m not alone.
COVID-19 has changed many people’s habits and routines
and allowed for new consumer behaviors to emerge, most notably in the way we shop.
Shifts are also happening in our living rooms.
While linear TV once reigned supreme at reaching the masses,
digital video has truly hit a tipping point, becoming the destination for entertainment.
According to a Nielsen study, in the US,
YouTube reached more adults aged 18 to 49 than all linear TV networks combined in September 2020.
In the last year, people turned to YouTube on connected TVs like never before.
Whether it’s leaning back with a good movie,
dancing along to the hottest music video,
or finding zen with a guided meditation, YouTube is people’s mainstream.
Over 120 million people in the US streamed YouTube
or YouTube TV on their TV screens in December 2020.
These seismic behavior shifts might change the way you think about
driving awareness for your business or brand.
But we’ve developed products and new tools to reduce the effort needed to keep up with these
consumer trends and instead make it easy and efficient to hit your awareness goals with YouTube.
I’ll now turn it over to Global Product Lead Julia Karr to share these product updates
to help you plan, buy, and measure your brand campaigns.
>> JULIA: Thanks, Ali.
The foundation of a strong awareness campaign
starts with a data-driven plan for reaching your audience.
Reach Planner is our campaign planning tool that pulls in real-time YouTube data
so you can confidently forecast the media metrics your budget will deliver.
Kids’ clothing store Carter’s and their agency, Merkle, used Reach Planner to understand
which YouTube formats and frequency would maximize awareness for Carter’s heading into 2021.
This planning tool helped them develop a campaign that reached 51 million people at a 40% lower
cost per view than their average campaign.
For advertisers eager to plan reach across platforms, we are rolling out TV in Reach Planner,
which combines historical TV data and simulated YouTube data into a single reach curve.
TV in Reach Planner is now available in four countries, including in the US,
and will expand to 11 more very soon.
We will also begin testing TV in Display & Video 360 Reach Planner in the back half of the year.
To see how Pepsi Vietnam quickly adopted the TV in Reach Planner tool
to make their awareness strategy more coordinated, check out their case study on Think with Google.
It’s not just planning that sets your campaign up for success.
Creative plays an enormous role as well.
So once you have a solid plan of attack,
we recommend reviewing your creative against these four best practices.
No video creative? No problem.
Our video building tool, which we introduced in April 2020,
is coming soon to Google Ads so all of our partners can make
YouTube-optimized creative quickly and easily.
With your plan and creative on deck,
it’s time to buy the media that will deliver against your goals.
YouTube offers a variety of solutions to help you achieve your awareness goals,
but we understand that variety can sometimes introduce complexity.
In addition, we heard from you that your marketing budgets are under more scrutiny
and pressure to deliver results than ever before.
We built Video reach campaigns to address this feedback.
Video reach campaigns take the guesswork out of budget allocation and manual optimizations.
The campaign will intelligently serve the best combination of skippable, non-skippable,
and six-second bumper ads to help you reach as many people as possible in your target audience,
at the lowest price.
In testing, we saw that, on average,
Video reach campaigns for unique reach drove between 29 and 44% more reach
and a 16% lower CPM than using one or two stand-alone formats.
Video reach campaigns for efficient reach will be globally available
to all advertisers in the coming months.
For advertisers who care more about maximizing completion rates rather than unique reach,
we’re also going to introduce a new optimization setting specifically
for driving efficient awareness later this year.
To bring this product to life a bit more,
let’s hear from L’Oréal on how they used Video reach campaigns to maximize
reach and awareness of a new hair serum.
>>AFONSO: Hi, I’m Afonso Cruzeiro, Director of Marketing at L’Oréal Portugal.
Recently, our consumer research with Beauty Track
revealed that more than half of women have long hair and 60% rank frizzy hair as one of
the top concerns, especially amongst younger consumers.
To answer this consumer need,
we’ve launched the Elvive Dream Long range with Serum Stop Frizz as the star product,
with a promise of straight and up to four centimeters longer hair.
Our objective with this launch was to reach the maximum number of people
in the most cost-efficient way.
At L’Oréal, “test and learn” is our motto, and together with our agency, GroupM,
we are always trying to find new ways to improve our campaigns and better serve our consumers.
Knowing how hard it is to find the right mix of formats to maximize reach across different devices,
GroupM introduced us to a brand-new YouTube format: Video reach campaigns.
It was the perfect solution,
as it uses machine learning to serve the most efficient combination of formats for maximum reach
and saves our agency time on planning and optimizations.
I’ll turn it over to our head of digital, Pedro Marcelino, on the results.
>>PEDRO: Thanks, Afonso. With Video reach campaigns, we were able to get the most reach
ever for L’Oréal Portugal on YouTube amongst our target audience.
This translates to 32% more reach than other YouTube campaigns.
Video reach campaigns also reduced our cost per reach point by 41%.
The business results were extraordinary. Elvive achieved record market share with this launch.
Dream Long reached the highest market share in Europe, and our star SKU
ranked number one on the serum market.
We have continued running Video reach campaigns across other brands within L’Oréal,
and the results have been consistently positive, especially during lockdown where people
spend more time consuming video on the internet.
>>JULIA: Thanks for sharing your experience with Video reach campaigns, Afonso and Pedro!
In addition to the reach metrics L’Oréal spoke to,
we also offer studies to help you measure changes in consumer sentiment about your brand.
This year, our focus has been on making these measurement products faster and more accessible.
We’re excited about our recent launch of accelerated measurement for Brand Lift,
which provides faster results from your Brand Lift studies without
any sacrifice to the rigor of methodology.
Re-measurement is now also available,
so you can understand the impact of mid-flight optimizations or creative swaps.
We’re also working towards making Search Lift measurement available
for self-service setup in Google Ads.
Search Lift helps advertisers connect the dots between their YouTube campaigns
and lift in search behavior.
Above all else, we want to build ad products that drive business results for our customers.
In an MMM meta-analysis we commissioned with Nielsen, YouTube had greater incremental sales
per impression than TV in 91% of CPG MMMs that measured YouTube,
Other Digital, and TV from 2017 to 2019.
I’ll now turn it back over to Ali to wrap up.
>> ALI: Thanks, Julia. With the rapid shifts in consumer behavior,
marketing in 2021 might feel like a game of hide-and-seek.
But at Google, we’re dedicated to making it easier and more efficient to find and engage consumers.
It all starts with a data-backed plan.
Reach Planner is designed to give you the most accurate campaign forecasts so you have confidence
in the outcomes YouTube will deliver.
We’re also piloting the addition of TV data into Reach Planner
so you can plan YouTube and TV together.
When you go to buy, try out our video building tool if you don’t have video assets.
And remember that advertisers combining TrueView for reach and bumpers have seen higher
brand awareness lift than advertisers who bought either format on its own.
Video reach campaigns are the most effective way to mix these awareness formats on YouTube.
To measure campaign performance quicker and easier than before,
Brand Lift and Search Lift studies will be right at your fingertips.
For best practices and customer case studies on the products mentioned today,
I invite you to visit the Ad Solutions Center on Think with Google.
We look forward to hearing about your success on YouTube.
Thank you!