Six Of The Best

YouTube’s Debbie Weinstein tells Austyn Allison about the video streaming site’s new bumper ad format

- Austyn Allison

At this year’s Cannes, YouTube had its own beach, and one of the main messages Google’s video-streaming service was promoting was that it has launched six-second bumper ads.

The new format, released late last year, is unskippable and runs at the start of videos on the site.

Debbie Weinstein, managing director of YouTube and video global solutions at Google, tells Campaign that YouTube used Google’s Brand Lift measurement tool, which can assess metrics such as awareness, recall, favourability and purchase intent.

“We ran a whole series of experiments to understand what is the optimal point in terms of brand lift, in terms of advertiser benefit, but also in terms of users not being annoyed or feeling like the advertising was too much,” she says. “We found that six seconds was the sweet spot that was optimised both for user experience and for advertiser impact.”