YouTube touts effectiveness of six-second ads (GOOGL, GOOG)

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Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer gave updates and commented on the state YouTube’s six-second bumper ad formats and the platform’s viewability rates at the Dmexco, a digital marketing conference, on Thursday.

The company's six-second ads have performed well for advertisers, while its viewability rates stand at an impressive figure.

Ad viewability rates on YouTube are relatively high and improving. Ninety-five percent of YouTube ads meet viewability standards, up from 93% the year prior, as verified by unnamed third-party measurement firms. Viewability determines if consumers have seen an ad. This is a particularly impressive rate when compared to other digital platforms — internet viewability rates averaged 58% in the second half of 2016, according to ad tech company Integral Ad Science (IAS) cited by Variety. However, this may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, because IAS and the measurement firms verifying YouTube's viewability rates may define viewability in different ways.

Advertisers have been able to effectively communicate their messages in six-second ads. YouTube found that 90% of advertisers saw a lift in ad recall after it tested 300 mobile bumper campaigns. This could ease certain concerns about six-second ads’ storytelling power, as some creative executives are worried that six-second ads are too short to tell a story, according to Business Insider. Eased concerns about six-second ads’ storytelling ability could spur additional investment in the format. 

And six-second ads are becoming more widely adopted. YouTube saw a 70% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) increase in advertisers running six-second ads since Q1 2017, and one in three advertisers now uses six-second ads on the platform. Six-second ads have already affected traditional TV networks’ ad strategies — Viacom and Turner have experimented with showing fewer ads to appeal to viewers whose attention spans have been diminished by digital platforms' shorter ad formats. The increasing adoption of shorter ads could cause more TV networks to take on similar strategies.

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