We're huge proponents of YouTube's TrueView skippable video ad format because it delivers exceptional benefits to advertisers and agencies—e.g., they pay only for completed views, and gain near 100% viewability plus significant brand lift in almost every campaign.
That's why we saw Google's recent announcement as big news for us and the video advertising industry.
On Thursday, Neal Mohan, VP, Display & Video Advertising wrote that Google will no longer support buying YouTube advertising through the DoubleClick AdExchange (AdX) as of the end of this year.
The Future is Now
Mohan explained that this move comes as part of Google's growing focus on TrueView and its efforts to enable more programmatic buying of the skippable ad format, which it says represents about 85% of YouTube’s in-stream inventory sold today.
And since the YouTube ads bought through the DoubleClick AdX are not of the TrueView variety, Google sees this change as a way to invest more in “…continuing our efforts in TrueView….”
Google is clearly signaling its commitment to TrueView with this announcement. As we have been promoting for a while, skippable TrueView is prime inventory that brands and agencies should be buying as much as possible because of its many benefits.
On the flip side, Google is also signaling that forced view ads sold on CPMs are on their way out. As Mohan explains, clients buying TrueView are seeing "...higher engagement and view-through rates than with other video ad formats."
The future is now. Completed views and permission advertising—where viewers get to choose whether to watch your ad—just got a big boost. Now we'll see how quickly the rest of the industry follows.
What do you think? Do you agree that formats like TrueView sold on cost-per-completed-view (CPCV) are the future of video advertising?
Walking the Walk
Our platform runs only TrueView campaigns on YouTube—and we do so through AdWords, not DoubleClick. We've learned running TrueView right can be extremely powerful, especially when we apply our technologies to:
- Micro-target audiences no matter what part of the purchase funnel they’re in
- Integrate dynamically personalized ad versions that boost view and response rates
- Programmatically scale and optimize campaigns that meet advertisers’ national, regional and local objectives
- Analyze performance data and generate rich, actionable insights to advertisers’ creative effectiveness and ideal audience composition
Google likely will be announcing more changes bolstering TrueView in coming weeks. We’ll keep you apprised of these updates as they occur. BTW, you can read Google's original announcement here.