YouTube has announced the launch of a suite of tools in its Ads Creative Studio to help marketers unlock YouTube’s unique multi-screen, multi-format viewer experience, and reach audiences with relevant context, engagement and results. With these tools, marketers will be able to create multiple versions of a single display or video ad customised for different audiences, locations, languages or contexts.
Amidst the surge in digital video services, online Indians are curating personal video universes consisting of an average of five content platforms with YouTube emerging as their foremost choice for watching videos. YouTube on the connected TVs has emerged as the fastest growing screen for YouTube over the past five years. With creators using Shorts as another tool in their arsenal to express themselves, YouTube Shorts’ average daily views grew by over 120% year-on-year. Giving further definition to their content curation, 33% of connected TV consumers in urban India do not watch linear TV at all, with logged-in viewers averaging 2.5 hours of YouTube watchtime per day.
With the goal of engaging this growing cohort of connected TV viewers, over 50% of who watch content that is 21 min or longer on the large screen, YouTube has introduced two new advertising solutions specific to this audience, 30-Second YouTube Select Non-Skips on Connected TV and YouTube Connected TV Pause Experience.
Satya Raghavan, director, marketing partners, Google India, said, “In the fifteen years since we launched YouTube in India, there has been an all-round digital transformation, in connectivity and in content, and today, people have created a boundaryless viewer experience for themselves that straddles across their smartphones and their connected TVs. We are delighted that, in this rapidly evolving landscape, YouTube is the platform of choice for four out of every five people online.”
Moreover, with an average of 70 billion daily views globally, YouTube Shorts continues to grow in popularity amongst viewers in India with 96% aged 18 to 44 using YouTube Shorts. Shorts watchtime now also transcends devices with 88% of online 18-44-year-olds watching short-form video content on a TV over the past 12 months.
When it comes to GenZ, YouTube emerged as the first place they would spend their entire viewing session, significantly more than social media platforms. Moreover, in purchase decisions too, Gen Z relies on YouTube for ads that are personally relevant to them and 88% agree it introduces them to new brands or products.
Additionally, viewers in India are also splitting their viewing time across many different video formats, spending no more than 21% of their viewing time watching one format.
“This is a testament to the unflagging contribution and inventiveness of India’s vast and growing creator economy. Marketers have responded to this heterogeneity by tapping into YouTube’s unique environment to reach their consumers at the right time, in their preferred language, in the right need state, on the right device, with the right creative, and with their most appropriate products. Our AI-powered ads solutions that span the spectrum of creation, customisation and deployment will position businesses at the most rewarding intersection of mMedia, creative, technology and content that only YouTube offers, and help brands achieve their business objectives with the advantage of incrementality,” Raghavan added.
Together with the total hours of content uploaded to YouTube by channels in India growing by over 40% in June 2023 vs June 2022, adults above 35 years averaged over 70 minutes of YouTube per day in this month. Intrestingingly, watch times of videos on the “grwm” trend grew more than 500% in the last quarter of 2022 as compared to the same period last year.
Furthermore, the year has seen over 1.7 Billion views of videos related to or using generative AI tools globally. 70% of 18-44 year-old viewers online agree that they are open to watching content from creators that use AI to generate their content.
With several significant shifts and businesses navigating a rapidly evolving media landscape marked by ‘cord cutting’, YouTube has been investing in helping advertisers unlock overall media value through increasingly effective cross media campaign measurement. As part of these longstanding efforts, YouTube revealed that the Nielsen CPG meta analysis has shown that YouTube drives nearly 2.3X better ROI than Linear TV with over 65% of audience aged over 18 years reached on YouTube being incremental to TV.