Following a series of major brand safety scandals last decade, YouTube has opened up its inventory to third party measurement providers, while also improving its own brand safety tools, to give advertisers more confidence in their investment. As a result, the conversation has shifted more towards brand suitability – making sure brands are comfortable with the types of content their ads run alongside, while also boosting effectiveness with contextual alignment.
But there are still concerns around YouTube buys, highlighted by reports from Adalytics last year which suggested brands aren’t always getting what they likely think they’re paying for on YouTube.
VideoWeek spoke with Matt Nash, SVP EMEA at Pixability, to hear how brand safety and suitability measurement in YouTube is evolving, and where the main risks for advertisers are in 2024.
YouTube can obviously be bought directly by advertisers and agencies. What do intermediaries bring to YouTube advertisers that they can’t do themselves?
There are two main things that advertisers get from third parties that they can’t get when they run campaigns themselves. The first is deep contextual data they use to ensure they’re targeting brand suitable content, while also driving great performance. Google created the YouTube Measurement Program to certify a handful of companies like Pixability as leaders in brand suitability and contextual targeting. We’ve seen deep contextual data provide a lift as much as 30 percent -70 percent over what a brand or agency could do on their own.
The second big piece is technology that is focused on YouTube performance specifically. While Google has made a lot of advancements in their performance technology, there are gaps that can be filled by 3rd parties that focus just on YouTube rather than try to build solutions across multiple social/video platforms. For example, we’ve built solutions that can work with Google’s native platforms to enable a higher volume of campaign optimization to drive better performance.
What are the main risks for YouTube advertisers in 2024?
The biggest risk for advertisers in 2024 is wasting their spend on the wrong channels on YouTube. Brand suitability continues to be a challenge on YouTube because every brand has their own level of risk tolerance. One brand may prioritise performance and be ok with high risk content while another prioritises suitability so would avoid it.
Because of this, many brands are wasting spend by either being too conservative and not driving enough scale or being too aggressive but ending up on unsuitable content. On top of this, Google has changed their ad formats in many ways including their recent announcement to roll Video Action Campaigns into Demand Generation. While many of these changes are ultimately good for advertisers, it’s difficult for brands and agencies to keep up so tools are often misused which again results in waste.
Last year an Adalytics report claimed that YouTube was running TrueView ads that often ran on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps, where the ads play imperceptibly in the background, without sound and on an automatic loop. How can advertisers ensure their ads are actually seen?
This report was in reference to YouTube having ad formats where ads run on GVP (Google Video Partner) content that is outside of YouTube. For most ad units offered by YouTube you can avoid this content if you know how. On the Video Action Campaign ad format specifically (which is being rolled into Demand Gen), advertisers currently cannot avoid GVP. However there are many ways to drive performance on YouTube without having to use VAC, that advertisers can employ if they’re not comfortable with GVP inventory.
YouTube has been accused of delivering personalised ads to children in breach of regulations – how can advertisers be assured they aren’t serving inappropriate ads to children?
The New York Times and many other publications pointed out that there is no proof in the Adalytics report that shows that Google did anything in violation of COPPA. Some of the things pointed out in the Adalytics report are related to what happens after someone leaves YouTube and are out of Google’s control.
That said, it can be challenging for advertisers to avoid made -for-kids content on YouTube, because it is often mislabeled by the creator themselves. Pixability has an algorithm that helps advertisers identify made-for-kids content that has potentially been mislabeled by the creator to help ensure ads are reaching the right audience.
How are advertisers typically measuring their YouTube campaigns and which metrics do they value the most do you think?
Every advertiser is different which is why we built an outcomes platform that will adjust a campaign based on the desired outcome. We had Epson with a European campaign focused on measuring and minimizing their carbon footprint, Subway that had a campaign in Australia focused on attention metrics, KIND with a campaign focused on ROAS (and we were able to drive the highest ROAS on YouTube vs. any other ad category they used), and Chicken of the Sea was looking for broad reach which we delivered for them.
Many advertisers are also often looking for conversions or other performance metrics which can be done with or without using the VAC ad format. Some also want to measure by media metrics like Video Completion Rates and Click-Through-Rates which our platform can auto-optimise towards. Brand lift and search lift are also very popular types of measurement that we handle for advertisers, and we can optimise to maximise lift.
