Alright. Hi, everyone. Welcome. My name is Lauren Zoltick. I am the director of Performance Marketing at Storyblocks. Storyblocks is a stock media subscription service aimed at enabling creators and businesses to make better video content faster than ever. And we do this by offering unlimited access to a massive royalty free stock media library. It's all demand driven with award winning artists, and we also offer plugins that, provide access to this library directly within your editing browser if you're using after effects or Premiere Pro, and also the best legal coverage in the industry. So if you haven't, signed up for a Storyblocks subscription. Definitely recommend checking it out at Storyblocks.com. But today I am joined by Tom Youngblood, who is the creative effectiveness lead at, US Creative Works at Google. In his role, Tom works directly with some of the top advertisers at YouTube. And helps them make their ads more effective. And so his role sits kind of squarely in between, analytical and creative and with his background he is a treasure trove of advice around creating better partnerships, around uncovering, and deploying, merging creative trends, and around growing your business. So as a performance marketer myself, I am pumped, Tom to be here with you today and talk about the biggest learnings from top advertisers on YouTube. So welcome, everybody. Before we jump in, I wanted to just we had a couple of, kind of ground rules. If you have questions for Tom or myself, please use the Q and A tab at any time. We will answer the questions after we have our conversation, but we'll get to them, promise, and we'll try and answer as many as we can. I can't promise that we'll get to every single question. Just wanna be cognizant of people's time. But, we'll get to as many as we can. Also, following today's recording, we will also share, a recording out with everyone, of the webinar today. Via email. It'll also be available on storyblocks.com/resources. So if you'd like to re-watch or share with peers, colleagues, etcetera, that will be available as soon as possible following the recording today. Alright. Without further ado, Tom, let's get into it. Our first topic for today is the fundamentals of a YouTube ad strategy. But I wanted to start with just tell us a little bit about what your team does at Google and YouTube. Who do you work with? What do you do for them? That kind of stuff. Thanks, Lauren. Happy to be here. And, really grateful to be a part of this programming. Anytime I think of Storyblocks, the first time I got exposed to the platform was actually in part city in Utah, at a marketing event. And so anytime I'm exposed to the platform at all or I'm thinking about it, I'm brought back the mountains, which is definitely my happy place. So, really in a good state here today. US creative work as a creative effectively. We're a multidisciplined creative world. We work with the top advertisers as you said in the US for YouTube, but we also have counterparts globally. We assist with creative strategy, creative direction, testing, thought leadership, content, ideation, But really, all of it is in the service of just making the work work as hard as possible for the platform. And we're constantly thinking of new ways to story tell and try and get as most, get as most as we can out of, what you wanna do and meet the business goals of the advertisers. And we just try and have a little bit of fun along the way. I've been at Google for about ten years, about half of that time was in media, working with mainly, independent agencies across the US And then the second half has been focused on creative and really this evolving lexicon of video language and, what makes effective creative, for video. Amazing. So there are more and more options for brands to advertise on now with new social platforms, new placements. Why would you recommend brands advertise on YouTube? I know for us, it's it's sort of an always on platform and we're constantly testing new areas. So I'm curious why you would advise brands to to spend their dollars there. Yeah. I mean, look, like, the way everything is situated now, you've gotta be advertising on multiple platforms to be effective because our attention is multi as well. We live in this multi platform multi screen world, and everyone is everywhere at all times. Right? We have that preference. But when it comes to YouTube specifically, I think we're in a really interesting position right now because as the platform has evolved from, you know, this early breeding ground for online video, it's now become something a little bit more elemental in how we experience internet creativity and expression. I, you know, have seen it grow from, you know, this hub of creators where you can find a niche to now this explosively rich platform where you can find any and all things that you might be interested in, you know, for me specifically, I first really got into YouTube, you know, in the mid two thousands because it was the only place where photographers were posting content that was educational. Right? Everything else was buried behind graduate programs and books. But when we think about advertisers who are trying to reach people, Look, like YouTube has creators and content that people love. It's multi surface, multi platform. We have an enormous audience that can meet any and all types of brands and the types of folks they're trying to reach. We have, you know, gargantuits amounts of watch time over two point five billion hours per month, folks eighteen plus. And I think one of the things I love about YouTube the most is that we've provided a real home for people who wanna make a career out of the things that they love who otherwise might not be able to do it. We've paid out fifty billion dollars to two million creators over the last several years who are uploading, you know, five hundred hours of content per minute. So it's really, really a remarkable place. And I have a huge amount of gratitude for being just a small part in making this thing. The magnitude of it is just wild to, like, process and think about how much content is being created on a daily basis. So we talked a little bit about you and I, the three kinda key pillars that your that your team uses to talk about, an effective YouTube ad strategy. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Yeah. And this has been an important thing for us because as we've studied effectiveness more and more, we went from very few learnings and very simple ideas of what you needed to do to something a lot more nuanced, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, and now it's gotten to the point where it's gotten so nuanced where we needed still it back down again to make it approachable and accessible for people. But it really comes down to three main things that you need to be keeping in mind. The first is what we like to think of as the creative essentials. Right? And these are the building blocks, the common denominators of effective creative on the platform. Are you hooking people? Are you grabbing their attention? Are you branding effectively? Are you connecting with them in a meaningful way and delivering value? Are you doing it in a human way? Are you communicating your product effectively? And then are you telling people what to do next? Right? If you're doing those basic things, you're gonna be already doing better than a lot of the other paid creative that's on the platform. The second big thing that we're thinking about is create a variety. Right? Not just how do you show up in this multi screen multi platform world with vertical video, horizontal video, right, to accommodate all these different viewing behaviors, But also how do you deliver creative that's different lengths, right, something that's ultra short, like six seconds long, or creative that is two to three minutes long or even an hour long. And all of that can be, adjusted to meet your needs, obviously, but what we see is that having that variety of content will really help deliver the most effectiveness, not only because it allows you to have more serendipity in your storytelling and deliver different types of experiences to the viewers, but also because a lot of the media products that we have now, powered by AI will thrive and feed off of that variety a lot more because it has more choice. And the last discipline that is probably hardest to put your finger on, but is the most creatively rich is just what we like to think of as the creative possibilities, that are available to you on YouTube, as a creative canvas. You know, we have probably some of the biggest latitude when it comes to online video, storytelling capabilities, coupled with the ability to reach the right people effectively and deliver business results. And so we are constantly talking to advertisers about how do they not only hit those two main marks of essentials and variety, but then as we come into those, how do we start to experiment and test new and different ideas that can deliver tremendous amount of upside in their results? And then this is separate from those three pieces, but definitely something we like to think about a lot as well is just having a real testing mindset. How do you experiment and try new things and push your envelope and boundaries so that you can learn and discover new things, that can ultimately deliver like I said before, better business results. Yeah. I love I love that framework and it's something that we've adopted, at storyblocks from from speaking with you. So okay. So a lot of folks are probably, you know, it's q four, either refreshing their YouTube ad strategy or they're building out a new one Now a lot of times it can feel like a little bit of a chicken in the egg like where to start, whether you start with your audience, whether you start with your goals, what advice would you give to a team that's either starting out or in the middle of a refresh for their YouTube ad strategy on on where to where to dig in and where to begin. Yeah. And I think that one of the most important things to consider here is you don't necessarily need to boil the ocean to be tremendous defective or deliver more effective results than you have before. And when I say effective, I mean, are you delivering brand awareness, or are you delivering consideration are you delivering sales against a more efficient cost per acquisition than you were before? And what I mean by that, not boiling the ocean, is thinking about what are the simple optimizations and resources that we have available to try and make this work a little bit more effective. So for example, Right? We have seen that having bright assets, having high contrast assets, starting with a faster pace. These are all really easy things that can make work more effective, not just on YouTube, but on, other platforms as well. And making sure you bring some of those elements in mind when you're looking at the creative can already deliver really strong results. I mean, even just thinking of the variety I mentioned before, simply adding vertical video to an existing campaign that is only running horizontal, we've seen deliver ten percent on average, better cost per acquisitions compared to just having that one orientation. So there are a lot of different ways you can think about it, but oftentimes when we talk to advertisers who are trying to take a new direction or pivot a little bit, we definitely want to go in those new territories, but we all also wanna make sure that they're taking advantage of all of these incremental opportunities that are on the table that don't require a lot of resources to take advantage of. So I would love to jump to our second topic, which is the creative essentials to high performing YouTube ads. And I wanted to ask you, you know, the difference between a great YouTube ad and a good YouTube ad, what are the, like, kind of essential components that you see that differentiate those things? Yeah. So I think it's important to note that we talk about good versus great. Good, at least from our standpoint, is generally creative that is following a lot of those best practices that I talked about before. And I can go in those, in a little bit more detail if folks want me to. But then when it comes to great creative, that could be content or creative that is adhering to all of those best practices and it's just dialed into the nth degree, or we like to think of that as like workhorse content. Right? Mhmm. Or it could be creative that's just coming from a really, really good insight and is serendipitous and delivers a different experience that people might not have considered before. You know, I think back to I I know we mentioned this in a lot of the promotional materials that went out at the beginning of the cycle here, but we did work with Hulu a while back to promote their, murder mystery show only murders in the building. And we had an insight that we got to by trying to think about, okay, we have two different audiences here. We have new and existing or sorry. We have existing viewers who love the, you know, the the the mystery, the easter eggs, trying to find new things. But then we also had this other audience that would have been in that new audience that loves, like kind of passive content. Right? If you think about the fireplace that you put on, on your TV screen during the holidays or, like the backgrounds that you often see in low fi content now where it's kind of just a miniature static image, right, very, very small movements, but nevertheless, a video. We said, okay, what if we combine those two things to create something that is uniquely murders in the building ask? And so what we ended up creating were four ambient rooms, that were each an hour long and lived in pre roll. And throughout the hour long ads, there were little easter eggs peppered in that folks could, glean onto if they paid attention, and that created a whole discussion in the comments. I bring up that example, though, because it didn't hook people in. Right? It didn't have a ton of branding comparatively. Right? It broke all the best practices, but nevertheless, it started with great insights which led to really effective work. And I think that's what we need to remember all time even in our role is that we can't boil this all down to ones and zeros. Right? The common denominators are the common denominators. And we can rely on those when we have to, but there are still really, really amazing ideas out there that can break all of those rules. And we love to see a mixture of the two, which goes back to that idea of variety. Yeah. I love that. I will I will say now that we've talked about breaking the rules, there were a few comments from the audience around wanting you to dig a little bit more in to the sort of fundamentals of what makes, you know, great YouTube ads. So if you don't mind digging into that a little bit more, Yeah. Absolutely. So when we think about these common denominators, we've sort of distilled it down to what we like to call our ABCDs, which stands for attract brand connect and direct. And if you follow this arc, what we tend to see is that you'll have, better short term sales lift and better long term brand attribution or brand awareness. So what are the different nuances here? And it's important to note that as we've studied this more and more, it's gotten more nuanced by marketing objective, by vertical. So it can depend in different circumstances, but here are kind of the basic frameworks. When we think about attract, it's really about are we getting the audience's attention and are we doing so in a way that particularly on YouTube will prevent them from skipping. Right? And if they don't skip, they'll get to the rest of the content and absorb whatever the story is. So within those first five seconds, what are the different tools that we have available to us? To really harness people's attention. We know that sound in particular is really, really important on YouTube. And that's not just music and the way that music and sound effects orient folks within the story that you're presenting them with. It's also things like which can be tremendously overlooked oftentimes when it comes to online video because so much of online content is played sound off or passively, right, based prior behavior. Another big piece of this is what is your talent doing on screen. Right? We know that if you open with a really wide shot oftentimes, it can lead people to not really be able to see what's on screen. Especially if they're looking on mobile, which is really small. And so if you have talent, like, in the very, you know, bottom right hand corner or in auto, like a car coming around the corner of a mountain, you can't see the car, right, if you're on a mobile phone. So we know that starting with a tighter shot oftentimes can create more attention grabbing behavior, particularly with people who are breaking the fourth wall, in your casting. Right? If we think about branding, especially when it comes to awareness, it's are you just branding enough so that people know that who people know who is speaking to them. Right? So for awareness, we know that branding roughly three plus times is gonna correlate with more effectiveness compared to branding fewer times. We also know that branding really richly works better than branding in more of a myopic way. What do I mean by that? Branding Richly means are you showing up with your brand in lots of different ways? Are you showing your logo either on the product or on screen? Are you having talent voice over the the brand in the first few seconds, as well as at the end, for, say, like, were acquisition focused creative? Are you instead of just branding to brand? Are you branding in service of the product that you're trying to promote, right, like really textualizing it around the product or service. This is incredibly important. When we think about things like connecting with the audience, this is a little bit more ambiguous, but it comes down to, hey, are we being inclusive? Are we representing people? Are we, showing people if we're talking about acquisition creative again? Are we showing people how the product fits into their needs and their lives rather than just in a context of a a story that might be more heroic and that can live squarely on the awareness side of things. And then when it comes to direct, are you just telling people what to do next? I would say this is while we see CTAs being really important across the funnel, it's of particular importance when it comes to acquisition creative, telling people specifically what they should do at the end of a piece of content, tends to lead to better results. And So when we think about call to actions, it's not just, hey, here's the brand. It's, you know, go try story blocks etcetera, etcetera. Here's the free trial, etcetera, etcetera, telling people what to do specifically seems to land a lot better. I love that. And I love the the framework of ABCD. You know, earlier this year, Story Black started running these pre roll ads And you were talking about, like, audio and sound and the impact it has on, creative effectiveness. And the ads were really simple. They were storyblocks, library clips of people kind of shooting or filming a more difficult shot using a drone or camera. And the camera or drone breaking because they were flying it through the woods or you know, they were using a GoPro while, snowboarding. And then it sort of said, should have used storyblocks implying that, you know, you wouldn't have lost your camera if you had relied on our library. And what we learned, which I thought was really interesting and kind of unexpected, was that when we had, like, kind of audio that hooked you right away. So someone grunting while they're falling down, you know, on a on a ski mountain or, the, the sort of sound of the woods, and the drone flying through it. It was really effective and people watched you know, ninety five percent of the ad or a hundred percent of the ad, versus when we went on other platforms like like Facebook, where audio is not something that people are listening to right away. It had no effect on if people would watch it all the way through and click. So on YouTube, it was just way more effective to have audio and it it was a huge hook for us. So with that being said, my next question for you is around optimizing and testing. What advice do you give your clients, around optimizing, and testing their content to make it more active on on YouTube and beyond. Yeah. This is really important. And I think when it comes to learning something really specific, the most important thing we talk to advertisers about is focusing on just one thing. And this goes back to, you know, basic testing efficacy and hygiene that you would have studied in grade school, but it's interesting how when we come into the marketing space, it can get very complicated very quickly. And I deeply appreciate all of that, complexity because marketing campaigns are really tough. Right? Especially when you're doing it multi platform. So it's not very easy always to set up tests in a way where you're isolating different variables. But that's part of the reason why we exist to help navigate that. But focusing on one thing is incredibly important because it allows you to isolate that variable, get the learning, and then from that learning being able to go to another specific, another specific piece of learning agenda that you'd want to go through after it. So just to give an example, Right now I work in travel and telecom quite a bit. But before then, I worked in media and entertainment. And when I was working in media and entertainment, we spent a lot of time agonizing over trailers, right, just trying to understand what are the best ways to deliver trailers to people. And we had all these questions around, okay, when should talent show up? What how does what is the best way to start? Are there different? Types of, scenes that we should prioritize over others, but then we started focusing on, okay, if we know that people if we can get people to watch the trailer just to begin with. All those other, challenges become easier to solve for because the number one thing is getting them to watch. And if you remember a lot of trailers, that you've watched maybe. A lot of them start slow. Right? You have the wide shot. You're coming across the forest maybe. You're slowly zooming in on the car, which has, you know, our protagonist in it, you know, think of like the way rush hour movie began, like, coming up with Hong Kong over the bay. That's really tough to keep people's attention in a skippable environment. So we came up with this idea of the trailer before the trailer, which if you've seen an ad for a trailer now, it might start with a really fast paced almost like trailer before the trailer, and then it'll have the title of the film followed by the normal trailer that you you'd see, but that all stemmed from this one idea and this one thing to learn, which was how do we get people to watch more early. Right? And so we started testing these bumpers, in the front end a lot more, which ultimately led to what is now a best practice. So I have a zillion examples of that, but I think it's really important to not get lost as I said before in the nuance and think about one thing at a time and allow those learnings to stack up against one another, which, you know, after they've accumulated, you have a really robust body of knowledge. So so tied to that, I think one of the the biggest things that I've seen or trends that I've seen happening with ads this year is, how much people are pulling from organic content, to use as paid ads. So what would you say are, like, the biggest learnings from organic content that can be pulled into paid. Yeah. We're learning a lot about this right now, and I would say it's still very much an ongoing discussion. So much of this, you know, osmosis that we're seeing from organic to paid is breaking a lot of those rules that we had talked about previously. And it's opening up a lot of new conversations of like what works, what doesn't work, what are different formats and archetypes that these things can live in. But what we found is that Organic content, what works for organic can oftentimes be a really good harbinger of what's gonna work really well and paid. But not so much specifically in the best practices per se, but definitely in the concepts. You know, certain best practices have ported over. Right? We've seen that using, like, Supers, for instance, particularly for vertical content in organic social has ported over really, really well to vertical paid. In many cases, But when it comes to organic content, you know, the learnings from there, I I gotta give a shout out to our partners over at Little Monsters Media. They did an exercise where they categorized all of the different types of content that you can come across on YouTube. It's in this taxonomy, and it ranges from, you know, narratives, explainers, challenges, interviews, etcetera. Music videos. And what we found was that the most effective types of content, particularly organically, were mashups between the two. So if you're able to take, like, a challenge in an interview, you get something like hot ones, right, the really, famous first week east interview show where they take celebrities and make them eat chicken wings, very, very spicy chicken wings. But when we take that over to the page side, If we use those concepts as almost like inspiration for paid, that can result in really, really effective storytelling style We did a project recently with Angie, formerly known as Angie's list. And we were working with two creators, that were a couple and we came up with a truth or false game show where questions that people normally have for Angie would pop up on screen, and then the couple would talk about whether those types of tropes were true true or false. And we created a battery of content against these, that lived in, you know, mostly acquisition creative, but what they found was that having that different alternative storytelling style inspired from the organic side delivered really, really strong acquisition results for them. Awesome. Alright, I'd love to jump into our third topic, which is overcoming resource constraints to creative effectiveness. And so I wanted to start I know for a lot of folks, marketing teams, budget constraints, research constraints are increasing. And with efficiency always being top of mind from any marketing teams, that can that can mean that one piece of creative or one ad concept is tasked with more than one goal so that might be used across different channels, across different placements, across different, goals, for what you want the add to accomplish. And so I'm curious how you advise your clients around balancing those efficiencies, but also the best practice of customizing creative to the placement platform channel, etcetera. Yeah. The good news is that a lot of the optimization opportunities we have at hand can be done either entirely in post production or if there's b roll or supplemental footage, you can very easily reorganize the creative to be more effective. One of the earliest projects we did was with chewy dot com. They came to us with a fifteen second, TVC for the holidays. And, you know, it started with a wide shot of all the pets and then it kind of led into a little bit of brand storytelling, which then led into an offer. And then you had branding at the end. And this was mentioned drive sales. And what we found from reviewing the creative and looking at our best practices was that there were definitely opportunities to make it, more engaging. And so we found through audience retention that people loved this money zoom up shot of the pug the most. We said, okay, let's front load that image of the pug. We also know that the offer is really important. So let's front load the, initial voice over to be the zoom in shot of the pug plus the offer so that people immediately know, hey, here's talent you're interested in, the pug. And then, Here's an offer that we know might entice you more than some of the branding elements we had before, and that delivered much better results for them. So all of that can be done after the fact, which is very resource efficient. But when it comes to actually not overhauling your entire shoot to accommodate for all these different platforms. We're thinking a lot about this too, and I don't necessarily know if we have the right answer for it. Like, first of all, we're thinking about, okay, if at the very minimum, how do we just accommodate shooting for vertical plus horizontal in every shoot? Which is more challenging than it sounds, but nevertheless delivers disproportionate results compared to you know, the the creative tax of having to have all these different stories that you're trying to shoot. But we're also experimenting with techniques like having you know, your main shoot, but then you'll have someone, filming almost like UGC content or interview content or BTS content. On the side, which can then live, as like a B cut or a C cut in concert with your main hero creative. Which not only delivers on that creative variety that I talked about earlier, but also allows you to do more with less. Speaking as a member of a a family who at its peak had seven pugs across relatives that that resonated with me a lot. So so similar, topic for for teams that are struggling with research and budget constraints, while also needing to expand creative testing. Are there any tools or short cuts or tips. You referenced a lot of it being able to be done in post, that you would advise people to use in order to expand that creative variety. You talked about without adding budget or resources. Yeah. One of the ones that we haven't talked about already, but we're using more and more is just text to speech tools, which are becoming more available within our media products and and add products as well. But if you don't have VO, which, as I said before, can be really, really powerful for increasing the effectiveness of creative using those types of tools to make sure that you have, talent or a spokesperson speaking to the audience within the ads themselves if they aren't already can definitely help communicate more of what your brand is trying to do and engage the audience more effectively. Honestly, that's one of the biggest things you can do. Given all the other variables that are on the table. So I'd prioritize that over everything else. Yeah. Also quickly plug storyblocks just, like, even the example I gave recently around, we just added some sound effects from our library and that created increased our watch time on YouTube substantially. I think it was, like, twenty percent. So having access to a huge library like that to change templates, usually add sound effects, b roll, etcetera, can be really helpful. Can you provide a couple examples of ads that you've worked on with different clients that didn't have a large production budget or, were, you know, really simple to to create that crash in terms of performance? Yeah. I think the one that keeps, blowing my mind as of late is, work we did with a cruise line recently. And they had a a series of social videos, that were just living on their reals hub, or rather shorts both reals and shorts. And it was just of a, a dad, the father of a creator sampling food. From the cruise line. And, you know, eat something, go ten, another ten, another ten, very minimal branding, just a little bit at the end. But nevertheless, really communicated what the cruise line was about and really brought you into the moment. By just including that, within their creative suite of their acquisition creative, they were able to drop the net CPAs, by double digits. Which was just remarkable. Again, like, when it comes to that that's something that had no production budget, basically, right, because it's just UGC creative. When we think about something that had, just a, you know, a normal production budget, but needed to be more effective, kind of in the other examples I provided recently or before, one comes to mind that we did with, an online travel agency that you've probably heard of they were talking about their, past, but the co creative was shot in a starry night. Right? It was extremely, extremely dark. And while that gave off the right ambiance, and, definitely brought people into the moment. It was so dark you couldn't see anything. So all we had them do was just brighten the asset by quite a bit. And lo and behold, it improved their results by ten percent almost immediately. So we think a lot about not just how do we do more with less, but also again, like, what are the just these little changes or resource efficiencies that we can start to put in place to supplement what's happening in the campaigns. And provide different looks for for users who otherwise might have seen something else. Awesome. Let's jump into our fourth and final topic, creative possibilities, and what's next. So I wanted to ask you what your predictions are for what's next. In YouTube ads, and and just a few of any predictions with with social or YouTube overall. Yeah. It's I mean, as we were talking about before the webinar went live, this is a really, really interesting time. Yeah. And I think you know, as our understanding of online video and what works on YouTube, as I said before, gets more nuanced rich and differs by vertical and marketing objective. We're trying to figure out ways to simplify this. And, also, how do we use that understanding to qualify, like the planning and production process and the creative process. So as it stands right now, you know, our hypothesis is that big, big stories are gonna continue and grow in importance for brands. Really bringing people into the fold of what you stand for and what you do and the service you offer is gonna continue to be critical. But particularly, we think a way that folks are gonna be doing that more is through longer form storytelling. So think creative that's sixty minutes or sixty seconds long, two to three minutes long, which is a length we know coincides with, the highest driving of consideration. Brand consideration. We think that's gonna be kind of the nucleus of every marketing campaign. And what's gonna happen from there is you're gonna start to have more dynamic stories and dynamic creative being made on either end of the funnel. Right? So on the brand side, you're gonna have, different types of lengths and styles being permutated at scale, you know, to the to the degree of thousands and thousands. As, you know, tools to make those swap get easier. And then same thing on the lower funnel side where we're able to personal maybe by different audiences, different CTAs to be able to meet all of those demands. We're not there yet. It's still very, very analog, and we're learning about again, what works and what doesn't work, but we think that there's gonna be almost like this hourglass of a content strategy. All living, you know, at its center with big stories, which is great for YouTube because Yes. Long form is the main event on YouTube and, we want people to continue engaging with big amazing stories because that's what we're here to do and have been doing for a really long time. I I know we talked a little bit about this, before we started, but, I'm curious your thoughts around how AI will factor into ad creation and performance, moving forward. Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that is interesting just being on the inside here at Google is that, you know, AI has been the flavor of the week now for the near, but we've been using AI in a lot of our products and a lot of our processes for a really long time. A lot of the media products we have right now in place, like video reach campaigns and video action campaigns, the algorithms that sift through the creative you have and match to the right folks, those have been powered by AI for a long time. And so we've been able to experiment and test with that a lot, which has been really interesting. You know, I think on the generative side, we're still a ways away from that being able to meet all the demands of marketplace, like as we were talking about earlier, there are certain things that are very easy for generative AI to do around imagery, but but bigger components of storytelling, like, emotional nuance, curiosity, puzzles, nostalgia. These are really complex difficult things to boil down, and prompt, frankly, from the user input side. So I think we're a ways away there. But, you know, on our side, one of the ways where we're using AI more and more is just trying to make sense of a lot of information. So in our line of work, you know, when we're trying to come up with these best practices and common denominators of performance, we're looking at tens of thousands of ads across all different regions globally. And AI is a really powerful tool for us to be able to sift through all of that. Information at scale and distill down what are the elements that coincide with the biggest performance, right, being able to train models to look for branding, to look for CTAs to look for, you know, talent, right, where things are showing up. These are all things that AI helps us to do, and we've partnered with a lot of different groups to be able to make sense of that information. Yeah. So I think there's gonna be a lot more use in that camp in the short term. But it's anyone's guess what happens Yeah. Generative and creative side. I will I will also plug, for those new audience that are interested in how to leverage AI and video editing. We did a, webinar last month, with Phil Edwards from Vox and talked about how he uses, different AI tools with his video editing process. So highly recommend that it's on storyblocks dot com slash resources. Alright. My last question for you before we jump into the QA, is if you can leave the group with one piece of advice, what would it be? Don't let the allure of hail Mary wonderful creative ideas get in the way of you know, really attainable performance that can be done with, you know, simple optimizations. Those ABCs I mentioned earlier, we've looked at different verticals. And, you know, we found that only thirty percent of ads sometimes are ABCD optimized So that leaves incredible headroom and opportunity for just attainable performance at your fingertips. And I, as much as anyone, love pushing the envelope, and those are the types of projects that make my heart sing and, you know, keep me inspired as a creative, but at the end of the day, you know, a lot of us are working with or on businesses. Need to drive the bottom line and and, you know, that workhorse creative that's optimized and can deliver against the results from proven insights can still be a very, very, very important part of any strategy. Love it. I think that's such a Yeah. It's it's so easy to get lost in the the hail Mary, the what breaks the mold without actually building the the foundation. Alright. So let's, jump into the q and a, but right before we do, I wanted to, mention two things. One, our next webinar is gonna be December twenty first at one PM eastern. We're we're speaking with Matt Whittington, who is, the head of truly hard seltzer, at Boston Beer. And we're gonna talk about leveraging video to shift Grand perception and Drive revenue. So please join us sign up for that, webinar. I'm very excited about that conversation. And if you visit storyblocks dot com slash resources, You can find our previous webinars and more guides, white papers, things like that, similar to these topics. Alright. Let's jump into the Q and A. We'll ask a few questions and, let's get started. Okay. This question is from Carly how important is production value? Is it still fair to say that content on YouTube should be more finely produced in comparison to the low five video doing well on TikTok? Yeah. Great question. It does not need to be finally produced in order to be effective. We have seen great content that is extremely highly produced do very, very well. And we've also seen, like, the example I gave from the cruise line of the UGC video of the dad eating an sampling food, that, you know, has minimal production value in the traditional sense and and also did extremely well. I think what we are encouraging brands to do, especially those that that are very historically polished in how they show up. And overproduced or highly produced and how they show up, not overproduced, but highly produced, is to think about both. Right? Cause the bigger missed opportunity instead of doing one or the other is leaving the white space on the other side when you're only doing one. So we're still learning more about what the right balance of that is, but as of right now, we're definitely encouraging folks to think about flexing both sides of that coin. Love that. Alright. This question's from William. Oh, you mentioned a voice or audio to text tools. What do you believe is the best option? Different cases. We use text to speech, our tool. Quite a bit, which you can use within Google ads right now. But, you know, there there are a lot of different tools available. And, you know, for the most part, they're they're all doing quite good. Awesome. And it also just depends on what you're what you, like, what you're looking for in the career. Yeah. Right? You know, like, there might be very specific types of voices that you want, which might be delivered better from certain platforms, but we're using text to speech, obviously, quite a lot on our side. Makes sense. Alright. This question is from Alec. I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit here. So it sounds like, he gets content requests from different organizations, and most of them are for Instagram video. He's interested in a succinct framework to suggest they request YouTube video instead. So they they you want you want YouTube videos He wants to make YouTube content for his clients instead of Instagram. So he's kind of curious how you would suggest YouTube as being more effective than Instagram is is how I'm interpreting the question? Well, I think there are different use cases for either. Right? I mean, I I would start with by asking the client what and this is more on the business development side, but I would ask them more about what they're trying to do, the audiences they're trying to reach, the different stories they're trying to tell. And what business objectives they're trying to accomplish. We have products that can meet every side of the, of the business needs, awareness consideration, action. We can do it in a number of different ways, both with the storytelling styles that you probably using on reels or creating for on reels, but also in horizontal as well. So rather than thinking about Hey, I just wanna do YouTube. How do I get the client to do YouTube? I would start by asking the client what they how they're looking to grow and how they what sort of business objectives they're really trying to hit. And then from there, think about the ways in which YouTube is uniquely suited in order to build on the strategy they already have. So like, for example, if they're only running really short form content on Instagram, and they, have opportunities to tell bigger, longer stories in horizontal and vertical. YouTube's gonna be a really good place to do that. Right? Especially if they wanna tell those longer form stories because we have that capacity. Also, the economics of doing and YouTube are gonna be better because they're only gonna pay for a view in paid if someone watches thirty seconds at least of their three minute video. So just at face value, they're gonna get thirty seconds of watch time, or even if they only watch twenty sec twenty nine seconds of watch time, they'll get that for free. Essentially. So we have a really, really amazing, just in terms of watch time, platform for folks to be able to engage with brands. But then if you look at a lot of the the finer numbers and things like that, I'm sure YouTube offers a very competitive positioning. For the brand's goals compared, to other platforms. Alright. I'm gonna ask one more question. This one is from Zip. In terms of getting the viewer to continue to watch, how critical is including the offer in those first few seconds? Depends on the goal. I would say for action, like getting people to buy right away, or, you know, within us, very close time frame, to the first exposure. Having offers upfront can be really, really critical. For awareness, I wouldn't say it's as important for awareness and consideration. I would think more about just gaining viewers attention. We've spent a lot of time studying hooks. And what we found is that there are few specific types of hooks that work really, really well, too, just as an example, one of which being puzzles, like presenting someone with a puzzle that they need to solve visually. Bringing people into a narrative that has unanswered questions. Those types of puzzles work really, really well. We also see that using complex emotions in your hook, can be really, really effective for driving awareness and consideration and hooking people's attention. What's a complex emotion. Right? If we think about basic motions, it's happiness, fear, disgust, sadness. I think there are five or six complex emotions are, ones that combine a variety of those. So curiosity, nostalgia, you know, remorse, like things like that, playing around with those different, like serendipity, elation, those types of things. Being able to play with those types of emotions can arrest folks attention very It's really interesting. Alright. I wanted to thank everyone for joining. Thank you, Tom, so much for for joining as well and for all of your advice. And wisdom. Just a reminder, this is being recorded. We will provide a recording to everyone, following today. It'll also be available at storyblocks dot com slash resources. A reminder to also join us December twenty first for our next webinar with Matt Whittington from Boston Beer. And, yeah, thank you again so much. I learned a lot, and it was a pleasure, speaking with you. And thanks everyone for joining from all around the globe. Alright. Thanks, Lauren. Bye everybody.
