YouTube is bringing its most popular advertising option to TV screens, as the Google-owned platform looks to capitalise on the rise of connected TV.
The platform today announced Masthead ads – the ad placements that appear at the top of the youtube.com landing page – will be made available on its connected TV (CTV) app.
Masthead ads are made up of two parts, a video and a still panel inviting interested users to click.
In the CTV offering, the Masthead will autoplay for viewers after a few seconds and be placed on the home screen of the app.
And according to YouTube Ads product lead Anish Kattukaran, this gives brands the opportunity to “be front and center of the YouTube app experience on TV screens”.
“We know the rich audio and visual experience of YouTube on TV screens means the potential to drive upper-funnel impact is bigger than ever,” Kattukaran.
“According to a recent experiment we conducted with Media Science, YouTube ads on TV screens drive a 10 per cent greater lift in recall than ads on linear TV.”
YouTube Masthead ads for TV will be sold on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis, and will also allow advertisers to customise the audiences they want to see it.
It can be purchased as either a single-screen or cross-screen offering.
CTV is currently YouTube’s fast-growing offering, according to Kattukaran, with daily watch time now at 250 million hours per day globally.
The platform’s TV offering is two-fold. As well as now providing the YouTube app on TV screens, there is also now YouTube TV, which launched two years ago as a broadcaster aggregator in the US.
As well as being YouTube’s most popular ad placement, Mastheads are also considered to be one of the priciest.
The video-sharing site only updated the ads from a per-day basis to a per-impression one earlier this year, after it was reported the daily spaces would sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
