Sustain Creative Excellence to Drive Enduring Growth with Amit Pande & Jen Donahoe

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we are going to talk creatives we're going to get a little bit more exciting than plvs and um dma and talk about what I think is the fun part of what we do in marketing which is all of the creative aspects that go into it so and and specifically around um YouTube so before we were talking a little bit more about Universal Universal app campaigns and AMT is from the YouTube team so introduce yourself hello everyone I'm Amit Pand lead product manager for app campaigns on YouTube this is uh super exciting for me because there is um I personally have had a lot of success um when I was at riot um with YouTube on so

many different aspects so thank you again five stars to you um for everything that you did for us um of at Riot so with everything going on in how UA is changing and targeting creatives are just so incredibly important into um what we're doing so we'll we'll hit a couple of best practices what's great is um we we're going to go into a lot of specifics that you can take away and go back to your team and and give them things to do so um let's just kick it off at a high level so from my perspective it seems like shorts are the the new in thing you've got Tik Tock you've got reals you've got you even YouTube shorts um which seem to be doing incredibly incredibly well I try to cover it on the podcast all the time um so from your perspective you know what what do you think is going on here like what's the secret sauce with all of this this ad format and what what can we take away as you mentioned Jen user behaviors are constantly changing

especially with global youth these users were born digital they have short attention span they don't they don't respond as well to traditional advertising and even on YouTube uh one of the trends we're seeing globally is as you mentioned YouTube shots is becoming so incredibly popular this we're now seeing more than 70 billion daily views worldwide and with that change we're also seeing advertisers adapting their creative best practices in fact one of the surveys we ran more than 80% of advertisers said that they are generating assets and creatives which are tailored for short form video platforms and as you think about generating creatives for these short form video platforms there are three key things to keep in mind first make the ad experience feel more native especially with the short form video platform

being vertical make sure that your assets are vertical and they blend well with the rest of the organic experience second these are optional watch surfaces users are highly engaged so it's really important to land your message in that first two to 3 seconds to create that impact and get the best performance out of these creatives thirdly one of the trends that we've been noticing is advertis are partnering with influencers to create more authentic and Native experiences these ads feel more relatable more engaging and that's one of the new trends that that is more appealing to This Global youth so with um ugc what was really interesting I I'll do a story time is um sorry a lot of it's Riot stories so forgive me but um we did two different things with ugc at Riot one of

them was uh we had noticed that there was a particular ad that was doing really it was animated and it was let's teach you how to play League of Legends it was funny it was almost as if it wasn't an ad it was content and it wasn't it was done by a Creator and so we actually reached excuse me we reached out to that Creator and said hey can we work with you to create content for us we were launching TFT we actually had them create a how to playay TFT video with that same humor and it became became our best performing asset of all of the assets was with this particular asset the other thing we did was so that was like an animated short like hey somebody create a fun piece of content and we did that regionally by the way so in Korea we would have a dancing penguin um and and then what we did was we talked to influencers and had them create a their face on a video and one of the interesting things we not only ran that as YouTube ads but we also ran that inside of the Google Play Store

instead of our ASO video and we found that that was just it converted incredibly well it had to be localized you had to have the Brazilian influencer in Brazil for example so I mean obviously we saw success are you seeing other people kind of have success in that vein with ugc creators yeah we seeing pretty massive adoption as people are starting to tailor their uh ads specifically for short form video platforms more and more of them are partnering with influencers they're seeing significantly higher performance on these platforms by creating these native ads experiences got it so on on Creative strategy so as I thought about creative strategy I mean it's not really changed too much over time it's been pretty much like okay who is your audience what are their needs what are your what's your positioning you're messaging in USP hopefully you know this already and you've tested it I don't love testing that in a UA environment but some people do that and then you get

down to um what are some different themes and you get to executions and trials and and all of that and I think you actually may have heard some people do it a little bit differently across some of the the teams today um as you think about giving advice to people like me and and and those out here with creative strategy what how do you think about that and what advice do you have yeah so Google's Network provides massive scale you can reach billions of users across YouTube Google Play play search our third party publisher ad Network through admob and it's important to deliver the right message to the right user at the right moment and in order to do that we recommend three things the first thing is make sure you are treating creatives as the fuel to supercharge your app campaigns um this is the fuel that's going to feed into

the AI and machine learning that will help discover users so one of the best practices is make sure you are uploading maximum amount of assets that are allowed by the app campaign so for instance on Google's platform uh we we allow you to upload up to five text assets including descriptions and headlines five video assets uh 20 video assets 20 image assets if if you have HTML 5 assets make sure you get those 20 HTML 5 assets uploaded you're following the best practices that we just talked about for short form video platform where you're uploading at least two to three vertical video assets uh you are for these vertical video assets you're also leaning in and Landing your message in that first two to three seconds right so this is this is the fuel that's feeding into the AI engine the next thing that we do is we use the power of

Google's AI to tailor these assets for different placements across Google's inventory and there's a ton of technology that we apply for for instance we have ai enhancements like we'll take your image assets if they are lower resolution we will actually upscale your image assets we will depending on the experience say maybe you are on the YouTube feed and you are just scrolling through we will Auto Pan the the image asset to make it feel more native and deliver that better performance we will take your video assets and if you've only uploaded say horizontal video assets we will actually autof flip them using our AI technology so that you have vertical assets that feel native to the short form video platforms we we have a technology called Auto Trim which will take uh video assets which are maybe 10 15 30 60c video assets and convert them

into 6C bumper video assets that can be used to deliver uh deliver your message very quickly either as part of the Branded ads or as part part of a midf funnel um marketing strategy last but not least like everybody else we are investing in generative Ai and across the board we we're going to help assist both generate text assets image assets video assets so for your text assets being able to generate things like descriptions headlines and then you know you have the ability to go in and edit that but you have that generative AI helping you with that assist of technology and similarly with image assets we will autogenerate image assets that you can incorporate as part of your campaigns not only that we are already investing in autogenerating video assets we in fact take the assets that you're uploading to Play

Store and autogenerate autod directive videos that can be used to augment your existing app campaigns and that can deliver even better performance last but not least one of the key things that we invest in is experimentation this is very key to figuring out which are the highest performing assets uh it's important to make sure you're constantly replacing your low performing assets with high performing assets and it provides this AV experimentation platform where you can take your production environment and compare what would what would it look like if you added a few more assets to it how how does the performance of The Campaign actually change so we highly encourage you to to use this platform to continue to figure out which are your top performing assets and replace your low per Performing assets um constantly love it yeah there's there's so much you can do and I think when you

think about experimentation and you think about the ability to try these different types of assets it's super helpful to figure out what Cates work what creative is working for you potentially you could even use it on other platforms as well um so I wanted to talk a little bit about something earlier in the day we talked about the marriage of uh performance and brand and Jamie Burger who was on stage was like I think it's the same thing and um I love that and I would love if many more people thought that but most of the people that control the budgets don't think that way they're like and they actually still think that UA is deterministic and that you can actually kind of like give me all those specific numbers so how are you thinking about giving the tools to people like me and marketers and UA folks that on on the brand side um for for what we would call brand or awareness driven reach driven what are some of the tools that you have at disposal for that and what's really working yeah let me start with in fact

one of the things we did was we ran a user survey with advertisers like you to figure out what are the biggest challenges for advertisers that are looking to move to the upper or the mid funnel strategies and the two things that really resonated with us was one advertisers are looking to increase their reach yeah as they look to move upper in the funnel they want to be able to reach new audience audiences that they're unable to reach true low funnel strategies and two the biggest challenge is attribution like how do I prove to my CMO that the campaign that I'm running is delivering the lower funnel metrics that the CMO is really cares about so at at Google as we think about uh about your marketing strategy we encourage you to think about the entire funnel upper mid lower funnel marketing stry lower

funnel marketing strategy is something you all are very very familiar correct like we are trying to show the ad to the users that we think will be most influenced by seeing the ad and will drive those causal conversions that you can use to measure the impact of your performance campaign uh the benefit of this is this is probably the most efficient way of spending your marketing dollars the downside though is you're going to show ads to users that are most likely to be influenced but we will not show these ads to all users so there are blind spots in the system and in order to capture that blind spot we we highly recommend continuing to move upper and mid funnel so when we think about mid funnel we think about mid funnel is specifically targeted to show your ads to all users that are likely to convert mhm some of them maybe are less causal

but you're going to show the impression and as long as the user is influenced by the ad we will drive that midf funnel conversion this is especially important uh as you think about strategies where you're doing things like game launches correct where your goal is to reach as many users as possible and get your message out and then the third thing is when you think about upper funnel this is where you want to just continue to expand your audiences you want to figure out which audiences might resonate with your particular game this is probably the most efficient way to reach most number of users likely not as efficient when we think in terms of cost per conversion but more efficient when we think of think about it in terms of cost per each uh unique user reached so we recommend combining all three of these strategies

in the upper funnel strategy you have ability to do audience targeting so for instance maybe your game is targeted toward towards male from age 30 to 45 and you think maybe it could appeal to to female uh from age 30 to 45 branding is a great way to be able to test that with let's explore new new creatives create a test campaign with those audiences and see if it delivers message it delivers and resonates with that particular audience group and then ultimately then use that to influence your mid funnel and lower funnel strategies so at Google to enable this full marketing uh full funnel marketing strategy we have uh we have our existing app campaigns that serve the needs for lower funnel in addition for upper funnel on YouTube we have the brand campaigns which have been supp for many many years but one of the recent changes

we made was to enable measuring lower funnel metrics inside of the brand inside of the brand campaigns so in addition to all the usual metrics that you can measure for your brand campaigns we are also allowing you to measure the number of installs the number of inapp conversions that that you drive and this is again kind of going back to being able to prove to your CMO uh that your brand campaigns are actually not only branding campaigns but also delivering lower funnel conversions now one thing that is very important is when interpreting the results what you're going to see is you are reaching more users you're reaching more users more efficiently but your cost per conversion is likly higher and that is that is okay because the goal of The Branding campaign is to help you expand that reach help you figure out new set of users and you can continually tune your

audiences to figure out which audiences The Branding campaign might resonate to and in addition it's also delivering that branding effect where it's not just about user acquisition it's also trying to re-engage your existing users re-engagement got it uh in our midf funnel uh product Suite we've actually expanded our app campaigns to in to add support for bumper videos this has been one of the new additions where we want to make it easier and more efficient for you to be able to reach more users through these short form 6-second video ads which are super cheap so cost for impression is way lower cost per conversion is also V low it's kind of fulfilling that mission of mid funnel uh and really helping you scale your campaigns especially helpful at times when you're doing things like game launches and then in in addition we have

added support for Unique reach reporting so when you run these midf funnel campaigns you you not only can me measure your lower funnel metrics you can also look at how many users you were able to reach how efficiently were able to reach those users and again those could be key set of metrics that you can uh show to your leadership nice so full funnel metrics um you have something for each step of the way and I we didn't actually say this and and hopefully everyone knows we're talking about YouTube on mobile like so sometimes I think people are so old school and they're like oh like when I watch on my computer but you you actually had a stat um that most people are viewing YouTube on mobile these days um just a an incredibly high percentage of people so um for everyone who still has a mobile game even these uh these full funnel metrics can work for you um across everything cool did we leave anything out did we get it all in I think you

covered it all we covered it all okay that um wraps it up I think for the entire day I think I'll just close it out and say thank you for coming to the think games Istanbul Summit from deconstructor of fund and Google I appreciate you guys hanging in all the way to the the end here all right see you guys thank you