Toy World caught up with marketing expert Jonathan Chambers of Generation Media about considerations when utilising YouTube and Google in the ad mix.
After a relatively uneventful few years by Google’s standards when it comes to brand safety, YouTube has been back in the news. The headlines may not have been as eye catching this time around, but the accusations could be equally as damaging for brand trust.
Reports across a host of outlets claim that Google may have misled advertisers over the viewability of its TrueView format.
TrueView is Google’s proprietary video ad product that first disrupted the ad market by allowing viewers to skip after five seconds of an ad and only charging if:
• a viewer watches the full 30 seconds, or full length of the ad if under 30 seconds
• a video is activated by a user, rather than passively scrolling past it on a page
• the video is playing audio
TrueView as a format is closely associated with YouTube, however it does not exclusively appear there. If advertisers and agencies choose to extend the reach of the campaign beyond YouTube using Outstream video (previously YouTube Discovery), Google’s algorithms will expand the campaign beyond the borders of YouTube and onto video units available programmatically across the web. A recent report by Adalytics reviewed the campaigns of over 1,000 brands and found that many of the TrueView ads running outside of YouTube did not meet Google’s own guidelines.
No doubt Google is working to stop such violations, and we can debate all day long as to whether it is doing so vigorously enough, given that whilst it still occurs Google will benefit from extra ad revenue. The reality is that even for a company of Google’s scale, policing the entire online landscape is impossible.
The good news for advertisers targeting children and families is that there is an abundance of appropriate content on YouTube. Brands should ensure that any planned YouTube activity does not permit Outstream video to avoid falling foul of any alleged wrongdoing.
However, this abundance of choice can still make things tricky for toy advertisers, with so many routes to market available.
To read the rest of Jonathan’s analysis, view the full article here.
