YouTube & Reservation Media Buying:
A decade ago, if we wanted to buy impressions at high volume, we had to work directly with Google Ads team to help us buy inventory for larger ad formats such as masthead appearing on the top of the YouTube homepage.
Now, through reservation ads, Google is making it much easier so that smaller advertisers can also buy impressions for high visibility and access premier content. What’s available to buy is dependent on your market availability but you can get a CPM quote and have the rate fixed for your campaign period as well as holding the quote for 14 days.
One interesting aspect of the reservation is the YouTube Select targeting ads, where you can advertise among the top 5% of popular channels on YouTube.
As a new product release, you’re likely to need the help of your Google ad account representative with the first campaign that you run. This is because I’d expect the budget investment on this type of media buying to be relatively high.
Google Ads AI & Conversational Experience
Google Search Ads become more visual every day as a result of the platform improvement to meet customer needs and compete with social media. Google will add conversational experience over the coming months to Google Ads platform, where users can chat with the platform and receive suggestions using generative AI and images from their landing page. Advertisers can approve the assets before anything goes live, which we know is always a big concern for them. If the quality of this capability matches brands’ expectation, the function is going to be a great help to enhance the performance of campaigns and increase engagement. We already know many advertisers need support to keep their visual creative refreshed continuously.
Meta & Teens Private Messaging Settings
Meta has implemented higher restrictions for contacting teenagers. With the new restrictions, if teens are not among followers of an adult over the age of 19, that person can’t message them. Under this restriction teens can only be messaged or added to group chats by those who they already follow or are connected to. Parental supervision on Instagram was introduced a couple of years ago but now parents using this function can approve or deny their teenager’s (under 16) requests to change their default privacy settings. Just note that supervision is optional, and both parents and teens must agree to participate.
X Competing with LinkedIn
Job listing feature on X is now available to verified organisations in the US so they can post new jobs to their personal accounts as well as their business pages. This is an attempt to go after LinkedIn’s biggest offering. X is going beyond connecting like-minded people through their point of views, and users can now expand their business needs through featuring available roles open to hire in their organisations.