YouTube Announces More Sophisticated Targeting, Customization for Ads (Sep 25, 2017)
Google has announced several new tools for advertisers using its platform to reach users with video ads, and they highlight just how sophisticated the YouTube ad platform is becoming, at a time when Facebook is still struggling with basic formats and helping creators tweak their video formats to work with its ad limitations. There are four parts to the YouTube announcement: custom affinity audiences, which allow advertisers to reach users based on profile-based interests including recent Google searches; customizing video ads by context on the fly using automation; stringing together multiple ads to tell a story or react to user responses; better online-to-offline attribution. To my mind, the custom video ads are the most interesting thing here – they allow advertisers to upload a set of assets and have the system automatically mix and match them to create ads that feel like they’re customized based on the video the user is watching. As this TechCrunch article points out, that’s likely to make the videos more memorable, but it may also cross the “creepy” line for some viewers, and that’s the risk all highly-targeted advertising takes. Various elements of what Google is announcing take advantage of its increasingly strong AI and machine learning techniques as well as the breadth of its tracking of users (for better or worse) across the various properties it owns, and the latter may in future be hampered by increasing limits on this kind of targeting which will come into effect in Europe soon.
via Google
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.