YouTube marketing success playbook – Think with Google – Google Business Profile

Add another accountSign out of all accountsAdd accountSign outCreate new Google Ads accountMore business products from GoogleGoogle AdsMerchant CenterGoogle Business ProfileGoogle AnalyticsManage your site content preferencesMarketing profile settingsAccess your Google accounts in one place.You’re about to create a new Google Ads account. You can create multiple campaigns in the same account without creating a new account.Add another accountSign out of all accountsAdd accountSign outCreate new Google Ads accountMore business products from GoogleGoogle AdsMerchant CenterGoogle Business ProfileGoogle AnalyticsManage your site content preferencesMarketing profile settingsAccess your Google accounts in one place.You’re about to create a new Google Ads account. You can create multiple campaigns in the same account without creating a new account.Flynn Matthews , Jonny SilbermanOctober 2026 · 3 min readYou can no longer buy attention through brute-force media reach alone. Across mobile, desktop, and in the living room, people decide in milliseconds whether to watch or skip. To get more out of our own budgets, Google’s creative, media, and measurement teams overhauled how we build YouTube creative around three rules:Each tactic works on its own, but they drive the biggest lift when run together.Traditional TV ads love the slow reveal, holding back the brand and the point until the final seconds. On YouTube, that’s a recipe for an immediate skip.Instead, we build our creative around YouTube’s ABCD framework — Attention, Branding, Connection, and Direction — tailored for YouTube Shorts, in-stream, and connected TV. For a recent Google Search campaign tied to “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” we created 13 custom videos, built specifically for how people watch on YouTube. Our top three ads hit over 80% of YouTube’s ABCD standards — and drove a 3% to 5% lift in brand awareness.1Source: Google Internal Performance Data, UK, April 2026–June 2026.Here is what separated our top performers from the rest.Brand ads build awareness, but creators build trust. Increasingly, shoppers are looking for a trusted third-party perspective before they buy, and they often turn to YouTube.That’s why we stopped treating YouTube creator partnerships as one-off PR plays and started running creator-made videos directly alongside our brand spots. Instead of chasing raw follower counts, we pick creators whose audiences actually care about the product category.For the Pixel 10 launch, we paired our agency-made brand spots with videos from basketball and lifestyle YouTube creator Jesser. We put around half our media budget behind our highest-scoring ABCD brand ad, then ran Jesser’s videos alongside it in the same campaign. Together, the two-voice approach drove a nearly 2.5% lift in brand consideration.2AI-powered campaigns like Demand Gen are great at putting the right ad in front of the right viewer at the right time. But AI is only as good as the creative you feed it. If you just upload a horizontal TV cut, you will miss viewers scrolling vertical Shorts.To cover every screen, our teams follow a simple rule of threes: one video and three static images for each format — landscape (capturing connected TV and in-stream), vertical (reaching Shorts), and square (powering Discover and feeds).For Google Chrome’s U.S. desktop direct-response campaigns, Chrome marketing supplied Demand Gen with a full asset mix: horizontal CTV cuts, vertical Shorts, and square feed units in six-, 15-, and 30-second run times. Rather than running a single message, we rotated five core product themes and paired them with bespoke creative for specific audience segments like gamers, shoppers, and business professionals. In testing, our tailored creative campaigns for gamers and shoppers drove an 8% lower cost per incremental install.3So to ensure you can create, capture, and convert the demand you need, be sure your team asks three questions before your next YouTube launch:Director of Integrated Media, Global Platforms & DevicesGoogle Media LabGroup Analytics Manager, Marketing Science, Measurement & OptimizationGoogleCreate a free profile to continue reading and enjoy unlimited access to our latest insights.Follow usActual results will vary by advertiser.source