YouTube’s adding more ways for brands to advertise via YouTube Shorts, in order to tap into short-form content consumption trends, and maximize your branding opportunities in the app.
First off, YouTube’s adding Shorts into Video Reach campaigns, which use AI to place your ads to improve reach and efficiency.
As explained by Google:
“With this update to Video Reach campaigns, you simply upload a 60-second (or shorter) vertical video along with your other assets. If you’d prefer to use existing horizontal creative, YouTube’s campaign setup tools include AI-powered features that automatically adapt and optimize your videos for the vertical screen.”
Video Reach campaigns use a variety of ad placements in order to help you reach the right audience with your ads, which will also now include Shorts as a surface where you’re promos can be shown. In addition to this, YouTube says that it’s also adding In-feed video ads to Reach campaigns as well, providing even more ways to maximize your ad exposure through Google’s ever-improving AI placement.
YouTube’s also adding Shorts placement to YouTube Select, its premium ad presentation option, which ensures that your promotions are shown alongside the top trending content of the day.
“With the new First Position on Shorts, piloting across YouTube Select, advertisers can break through at the start of a viewing session. When a viewer opens YouTube Shorts and starts watching, your ad is the first one they will see. This lets you land a strong first impression in a highly immersive environment.”
YouTube’s been working to help both creators and advertisers tap into the potential of Shorts, with Shorts content now seeing over 50 billion daily views, almost double the rate it was seeing a year ago. The explosion of short video content is driving all new viewing behaviors, in all apps, and with that, many brands will need to reassess their advertising approach, in order to better align with audience response.
These new placement options will help in this respect, while the broader shift is also seeing a bigger focus on entertainment, as opposed to social interaction, which is a bigger change in engagement activity.
You can read more about YouTube’s Shorts ad placement update here.
