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Who Sells Short Shorts
Google doubles down on short-form video with new ad formats for Shorts-focused campaigns.
by Tod Maffin and Steph Gunn
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Google’s Cooking New Ads for Shorts
As short-form video continues to thrive on YouTube, Google is coming after even more of your ad budget.
New ad formats
Yesterday, Google announced new ad formats for Shorts, including sticker ads and animated image ads.
The new Shorts sticker ads will display an image from a product feed that, when tapped, opens a carousel of products for viewers to explore.
Animated image ads, meanwhile, pull multiple product images from your feeds and animate them into one ad unit.
These options let brands tap into Shorts without creating their own video content, by pulling images directly from Google Merchant Center feeds.
More buying control
Google is also expanding format buying controls, letting brands run campaigns exclusively in the Shorts feed or only use horizontal creative.
These controls are already available for Video Reach Campaigns, with a pilot for Shorts-only buying in Demand Gen underway for select advertisers.
Creator partnerships
On the influencer marketing side of things, Google is testing a new “Creator Partnerships” tab to centralize your influencer and affiliate marketing efforts.
It's also launching a new video linking API to manage multiple requests at once, and will soon let creators tag partners in their brand videos.
On top of that, Google is expanding its audience-building tools for Shorts, soon adding view durations and working on third-party sales lift measurement for Shorts ads.
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How YouTube Comments Could Save Google Search
As Google pushes Shorts, it’s also working hard to reclaim its search dominance with a new YouTube feature: hyperlinked comments.
Search dominance at risk
Google Search made Alphabet $49.5 billion last quarter alone, but reports show that for the first time in more than a decade, Google’s market share is about to fall below 50%, thanks to competitors like ChatGPT and TikTok becoming go-to search engines for Gen Z.
Turning comments into clicks
To protect its search lead, Tubefilter reports that Google is now using YouTube’s hyperlinked comments to drive more traffic to its search engine.
If the feature becomes a permanent thing on YouTube, it’s easy to see how this could benefit Alphabet. Even if some people find hyperlinked comments spammy, it’s likely that with hundreds of millions of comments across YouTube’s smorgasbord of video content, thousands or even millions of users will click on them every day, and generate potentially valuable traffic for Google Search.
Not only will these users be pumping Google Search numbers, but they’ll also presumably be targeted traffic, since (at least in ideal cases) they were already watching YouTube content about a particular topic, and now are being served more information about that topic.
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