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As YouTube looks to be taken seriously among TV ad buyers, the tech giant was ready to put on a show during Upfront Week.
The company—which moved its annual Brandcast event from NewFronts to Upfront Week for the first time ever this year—took advantage of its venue at Broadway’s Imperial Theater on Tuesday night, where it rolled out a new frequency capping tool for marketers.
It opened the show with a through-the aisles performance from funk band Scary Pockets, culminating in an appearance from Grammy-award winning artist Jon Batiste.
Rather than debut a slate of content like traditional TV broadcasters, YouTube invited several of its creators to speak or perform onstage, including Patrick Starrr, Nija and megastar MrBeast. If MrBeast’s channel was a streamer, it would have more subscribers (95.4 million) than the next three ad-supported streaming services.
The night ended with a more traditional creator: Lizzo, who performed her hits About Damn Time, Good as Hell and Truth Hurts. The platform introduced the megastar by showing her early YouTube videos, when she was just a young person trying to be discovered.
Lizzo lightly chided YouTube for showing the old, embarrassing videos. “I could see people cussing me out 10 years ago,” she joked.
‘You can’t really have a CTV campaign without YouTube’
The digital streaming upstarts and broadcast stalwarts may be duking it out for ad dollars, but YouTube—not always seen in the same category as TV—has the most watch time, commanding 50% of ad-supported watch time on connected TV for people 18 and over.
“You can’t really have a CTV campaign without YouTube,” Google’s president, Americas and global partners Allan Thygesen told Adweek before the event.
Hence YouTube’s appearance for first time during upfront week, which is traditionally reserved for traditional TV broadcasters. Typically, its signature Brandcast event is held two weeks earlier, during NewFronts.
YouTube doesn’t only want to be considered alongside TV, it wants to be seen as the better alternative. The company unveiled some new data to prove this: a Nielsen study of 14 large brand advertisers found that YouTube CTV is 208% more effective than linear TV at driving incremental sales per impression. Compared to other non-Google online video—which includes other streamers —YouTube is 54% more effective.
YouTube also invited Shenan Reed, svp and head of media at L’Oreal USA, to show how YouTube drives return on investment.
New frequency capping solution
Ad tech is of increasing importance as TV goes digital, with publishers like Disney and NBCU devoting separate upfront events to their offerings, often touting partnerships with ad tech companies. But YouTube has the advantage of being part of Google, given its giant advertising technology business.
At Brandcast, the company unveiled a new frequency capping solution, a potential fix for one of connected TV’s lingering bugaboos: viewers see a lot of the same ads in a given viewing session. The new solution allows weekly frequency capping, whereas previously the capping was per campaign, Thygesen said.
This applies to not just YouTube, but all connected TV inventory that can be purchased through DV360, whose inventory covers 93% of ad-supported connected TV households.
With the tool, an advertiser can ensure that in a given week, a viewer saw their ad actually three times, and not just an average. Using this tool, DoorDash drove a 50% incremental uplift in driver signups, Thygesen said.
