YouTube machine learning automates landscape videos into vertical ads

Ashley Regan
By Ashley Regan | 16 September 2022
 

Google’s new machine learning automates horizontal ads formatted for standard YouTube videos into vertical ads optimised for YouTube Shorts. 

In a blog post  the company says  YouTube is “experimenting with a new machine learning technology that reformats landscape video ads into square or vertical formats based on how someone is watching.”

The model looks for faces, key objects, logos, text, and motion in the landscape video to split them into “scenes.” In the reformatted vertical output, important elements get centred and are shown properly.

The update comes as YouTube “found that advertisers who added a vertical creative asset to their video actions campaigns achieved 10-20% more conversions per dollar on YouTube Shorts than campaigns that only used landscape assets.”

The new machine learning helps advertisers make better content who “may not have dedicated resources to create multiple assets.” 

YouTube is experimenting with these “instant flip video ads” for App campaigns, while they’ll soon be offered for Video Action and Performance Max campaigns.

“Given the fast pace of Shorts, there’s no need to set up a premise or create a storyline with a lot of extra context. Get in on the action quickly and your audience is more likely to stay close,” the company wrote.

Meanwhile, advertisers are also getting:

  • Four new, customizable vertical video ad templates and one square template are now available in the video creation tool in Google Ads, located in the Asset Library.

  • new set of vertical video ad templates to our auto-generated video offering, which creates vertical videos based on inputs you provide for a campaign, like text and images.

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