Google has launched new tools to help marketers better reach audiences, tailor creative and measure results.
The tools were revealed to AdNews prior to YouTube's Brandcast event in Sydney on Tuesday. The tools are designed to help marketers get more out of online video campaigns with improved targeting, relevancy, sequencing and measurement.
Google says there are 1.5 billion monthly logged in users watching over 1 billion hours of video each month on the platform.
On average people are watching an hour a day on YouTube with viewability scores of about 95%.
Google is expanding the ways marketers can use Custom Affinity Audiences to target people based on the kind of searches they do and the kind of places (using Google maps) and apps they like.
This will provide marketers with more ways to capture intent-based audiences and tailor relevant messages to them in context.
“We have found that it really is understanding someone's intention that captures their attention. That's what's always made search so powerful,” Google's VP of agency and media solutions Tara Walpert Levy (pictured below right) tells AdNews.
“The extension and use of those search signals more broadly has the power to make a bigger difference to online video.”
Walpert Levy tells AdNews about 1,000 brands globally have been using Custom Affinity Audiences since January. This has 
led to 20% higher ad recall and 50% higher brand awareness compared to campaigns that only use demographic targeting.
The expansion should provide marketers with more opportunities along the path to purchase.
The second new tool, Director Mix, allows marketers to create different versions of baseline ads with copy targeted towards the content people are about to watch.
“What happens is brands give us the building blocks of their video ads and our system spins up thousands of versions of the ad for different audiences and automatically optimises them against those intention driven target segments,” Walpert Levy says.
“That type of customisation has always been very successful in display but is much harder to do in video. The ability to bring that into video is making a huge difference to brands.”
An example is Campbell Soup's Orange is the New Black campaign, where the ad tailors a message that relates to the show when it is served. The aim is to register attention through relevancy.
Strangely, this same example was showcased at last year's Brandcast.
The next tool is online video ad sequencing that allows marketers to serve different ads along a campaign timeline.
This new feature, in AdWords Labs, allows advertisers to string together ad creative with the ability to pivot, react and you can take consumers down a different path depending on which ads work for them.
This might begin with a 15-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.
“We anticipate video ad sequencing will result in significantly more creative and customisation in market, which is good for users and brands,” Walpert Levy says.
The final announcement is a new global approach to measuring sales lift with Nielsen MPA (Matched Panel Analysis).
Google says this geo-based solution offers a fast, media-agnostic way to determine which online ads drive offline sales, particularly how video and other Google media impacts sales lift.
“This will enable brands to have a much more accurate read of digital in general and also YouTube and Google in particular,” Walpert Levy says.
AdNews asked if the new tool also considers offline media channels.
“For the moment it's only digital. The goal, of course, is to be able to have a universal read but at the moment it is digital.
“That is a step forward from where we are because prior it had been piecemeal by digital suppliers, so now we can measure universally across digital players.”
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