YouTube ML turns landscape video ads into Short-friendly vertical ones

Abner Li | Sep 15 2022 - 6:00 am PT

YouTube Shorts are a big focus for the video platform and Google wants to make it easier for businesses to create vertical video ads.

YouTube is “experimenting with a new machine learning technology that reformats landscape video ads into square or vertical formats based on how someone is watching.” The ML model looks for faces, key objects, logos, text, and motion in the landscape video to split them into “scenes.” In the reformatted vertical output, important elements get centered and are shown properly.

This is being targeted for advertisers that “may not have dedicated resources to create multiple assets.” It comes as YouTube:

…found that when advertisers added a vertical creative asset to their Video action campaigns, they delivered 10-20% more conversions per dollar on YouTube Shorts than campaigns that used landscape assets alone.

YouTube is experimenting with these “instantly flipped video ads” for App campaigns, while it will soon be offered for Video action and Performance Max campaigns.

Meanwhile, advertisers are also getting:

Four new, customizable vertical video ad templates and one square template are now available in the video creation tool in Google Ads, located in the Asset Library.
new set of vertical video ad templates to our auto-generated video offering, which creates vertical videos based on inputs you provide for a campaign, like text and images.

Meanwhile, YouTube earlier this week announced that it paid over $6 billion to the music industry between July 2021 and June 2022. That’s up $2 billion from the previous period. User-generated content (UGC) “drove over 30% of payouts for artists, songwriters and rights-holders, for the second year in a row.”