Brands are looking to reach the right people wherever they’re spending their time. It’s no surprise that YouTube is one of those places. What might be a surprise, though, is that 40% of YouTube Shorts users are not on TikTok or Instagram Reels at all, while 84% of TikTok and 88% of Instagram Reels users are already on Shorts.1 If YouTube isn’t a part of your marketing strategy to engage your key audience, you might be missing out on a large chunk of that audience.
To share more about the evolving social video opportunities for brands, we invited Celia Salsi, global director of marketing for YouTube Ads, to have this conversation with Melissa Hsieh Nikolic, director of product management for YouTube Ads.
Celia Salsi: You lead the team responsible for Shorts ads. What should brands know about Shorts?
Melissa Hsieh Nikolic: Brands should care about YouTube Shorts, because viewers love them. There are over 70 billion views every day,2 and 96% of Gen Zers in the U.S. say they watch both short-form and long-form videos on YouTube.3 It’s a core part of the YouTube experience now. But what’s really interesting and unique to YouTube is how people are watching Shorts, which is increasingly on TVs. Views doubled from December 2022 to December 2023.4
People come to YouTube for many reasons. They could be on a journey to go deep on their passions, dive into a new interest, or research something they’re considering buying.
Brands can optimise for this viewer behaviour by using our AI-powered campaigns, which seamlessly reach people across the devices and placements where they watch YouTube.
We also support advertisers who want to buy Shorts ads on their own for specific marketing campaign objectives or to run head-to-head tests with other platforms. Advertiser feedback helps to shape our products. That’s why we recently announced the ability to choose specific formats when your marketing goal is driving views efficiently. If you want to run a campaign exclusively in the Shorts feed, you can do that. That option is now available to optimise for both reach and views, so you have more flexibility when buying across Shorts, in-stream, and in-feed placements. We’re also in the early stages of piloting Shorts-only buying in Demand Gen with a limited set of advertisers.
How should brands think about building ads for today’s audiences on YouTube?
There’s only one YouTube. We want to honour that by continuing to build a platform that can actually make the viewing experience better for viewers, brands, and creators alike.
People come to YouTube for many reasons. They could be on a journey to go deep on their passions, dive into a new interest, or research something they’re considering buying. Regardless of why they come to the platform, they are truly engaged with our creators and ads.
The kind of creativity and fan engagement that advances pop culture conversations is the enduring appeal of YouTube.
This past month, YouTube creator Amelia Dimoldenberg hosted actor Andrew Garfield on her YouTube series Chicken Shop Date, and people just can’t get enough of it. Not only did the video have millions of views, but the engagement and interaction were noteworthy. There are more than 21,000 comments on the video, and, in the weeks following launch, fans have been uploading reaction videos and fan cams to Shorts. The kind of creativity and fan engagement that advances pop culture conversations is the enduring appeal of YouTube.
These fans are creating communities around creators. They’re commenting, sharing, and liking just as they would on any social platform. They’re even liking the ads! We saw over one billion likes on Shorts ads in just May of this year.5
Brands that tap into the Gen Z demographic’s interests and communities see great success. Seventy-four percent of surveyed Gen Z fans (online 14- to 24-year-olds) agree they like seeing brands engage with things they’re fans of.6 As people look for useful, trustworthy information on YouTube, ads must deliver that same level of usefulness and trustworthiness. For example, we significantly expanded Shorts suitability controls and reporting this year, including third-party brand safety verification capabilities.
What’s unique about Shorts ads compared to other YouTube formats?
The mentality of a Shorts viewer is the biggest thing. Inside the Shorts feed, people are engagement-happy and ready to tap, swipe, and click. It’s not just mindless scrolling. Recently, we shared how brands can best stand out in people’s Shorts feed. On top of a brand’s excellent storytelling, we also want formats that drive action. One fun example is stickers for retailers, which can make ads that much more appealing to viewers. Those are available for all retailers now, so just make sure that your feeds are connected and that’ll start happening automatically.
Your team also oversees partnerships with creators, and we know brands can get great results when a marketing strategy features creators in campaigns. What are some new ways brands can think about incorporating creators into their campaigns?
So many brands know the power of creators. Research shows that ads that appear within or alongside creator-driven content drive stronger results at every stage of the consumer journey, compared with ads viewed alongside non-creator content. On YouTube, creators have an even more special relationship with viewers and new features, like Communities and Hype, are about to make those connections even stronger. In an Ipsos survey, users were 98% more likely to trust the recommendations of creators on YouTube compared to other social platforms.7
YouTube creators have one particular superpower that brands should care about: helping people make decisions. Because of that, we’re making it easier than ever to bring your existing creator-made ads to the platform so that they can power your YouTube campaigns. We’ve introduced a new API that enables you to connect all of those existing video ads to your Google Ads account. Those linked videos become partnership ads, which are now globally available and can be added to any AI-powered campaign in Google Ads.
We know that brands can see incredible results when the large reach of YouTube comes together with the magic of creators. These are marketing strategies many brands are already executing really well elsewhere, and they can get so much more by including YouTube.
