How marketers and creatives benefit from new AI features on YouTube

The annual YouTube Festival took place in Berlin on August 28th, with many brands and creators presenting their work on and with the platform. And it became clear again how much YouTube is now a part of consumers' daily media consumption – and is therefore actually indispensable as a platform in the media mix. The 2024 European Football Championship, for example, recorded over 500 million hours of viewing. The Olympic Games were also broadcast live on YouTube. Athletes not only took their fans with them to the stadium for the competitions on YouTube, but also into the locker room – in a wide variety of formats: on mobile phones, desktops or on the connected TV in the fans' living rooms. And the fans themselves are also creating a lot of content in the same variety these days. This means that brands have to be able to keep up!

How brands must respond to today's platform and asset diversity

Examples that not only demonstrate the relevance and acceptance of YouTube, but also show how much user behavior has changed over the years. Today, YouTube is consumed by all age groups on a wide variety of devices – often even at the same time.

This presents marketing teams with major challenges. They must tailor campaigns and content to this wide range of usage behavior and respond to it with tailored creativity in their advertising materials. It is important to produce significantly more and more creatively diverse assets in order to perform well. A time-consuming and costly undertaking that has so far prevented some companies from developing their own YouTube strategy, for example.

A survey by Kantar from 2023 shows how important such a strategy is. According to the survey, YouTube is the #1 video platform for personally relevant content in Germany.1 And a new survey from spring 2024 even shows that if viewers in Germany could only watch one service for an entire year, the #1 platform they chose was YouTube.2

In short, it is essential today to have a YouTube strategy to reach your target audience.

AI features on YouTube increase creativity and reduce the burden on the marketing budget

Innovative AI features are already helping marketers on YouTube to explore new ways to produce video content faster, cheaper and more efficiently. Successful creators are leading the way: According to a survey by YouTube and the market research company Ipsos, 82 percent of creators surveyed in Germany believe that AI could save them time or potentially save them time. In addition, 74 percent of them believe that AI could give them the chance to create content that would not have been possible without AI tools.3

Produce better campaigns with less effort

Advertising companies are also content creators and can benefit from these new opportunities for simplified asset production. YouTube recently introduced new AI features that will be available to advertisers in the future.

Creating cutdowns and variations of video assets is usually a very time-consuming and costly process. The open source tool ViGenAir uses generative AI to transform a long video into several different variations of length. It analyzes a creative, compares its elements with other successful examples in its own backend and then re-edits the asset. Here, ViGenAiR shortens the process from days to minutes – and is significantly more cost-effective.

Other tools: Dream Screen, which makes it easy to create incredible, imaginative backgrounds, or Veoa text-to-video tool that will allow you to create complete videos using a simple command prompt.

Additional features will enable AI to generate assets for new ad formats in the future. Advertisers can use animated image ads to promote relevant products as YouTube Shorts Shorts have become an integral part of the format mix on YouTube and record an average of over 70 billion views per day worldwide.4 The ads in Shorts are generated using Google AI, which is automatically fed from the images in your own ad account.

Animated image ads as shorts on YouTube

Generate and play animated image ads as shorts on YouTube using AI.Asset production along your own CI in AI-supported campaign types

In addition to more creative and efficient content production, artificial intelligence also offers many advantages when it comes to delivering content. Examples of the power of AI-supported campaign types on YouTube are Demand Gen, Performance Max or Video Action Campaigns. This allows marketers to use a single advertising campaign to tailor multiple Google channels with images, videos, text and other content, thereby significantly improving both the conversion rate and the return on investment (ROI).

With the Performance Max campaign type, it will soon be possible to have assets created in line with your own corporate identity (CI) using Google AI. To do this, the CI data must be stored and helpful reference points for images must be provided. The AI ​​tools then use this to generate new asset variants for the various channels.

Create powerful ads with Google AI

Brands will soon be able to store their corporate design in Performance Max.YouTube is also introducing additional image editing features. This will allow advertisers to add new objects, extend backgrounds and crop images to suit their needs. Google's AI tools can constantly generate new recommendations on how to show products in different contexts and scenarios.

Internationalization of content made easy

Another feature that will soon be coming to the German market is YouTube Aloud. It enables the internationalization of content with AI-based audio dubbing. Marketers and creators can use it to offer their videos in different languages ​​without having to dub them themselves in the respective national languages. The AI ​​translates the texts and uses the speaker's voice to create a lip-synced dubbing.

Since all views are collected in one channel, country-specific channels are no longer necessary. This saves a lot of time and money and also improves measurability. Visitors to this year's OMR Festival were able to learn how this works in practice from Mateo Price, MrBeast's Chief Strategy Officer. With more than 300 million subscribers, MrBeast is now the biggest YouTuber in the world. In a conversation with Andreas Briese, Price explained how his team on YouTube is using the full creative potential with the latest AI features.

These very different application examples show how innovative AI features are already helping with successful and efficient YouTube strategies. The relevance and performance of these features will continue to increase due to the enormous innovation dynamics, and this is already becoming apparent.

Always stay up to date: There are many exciting insights and success stories about YouTube on Think with Google.
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