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How the gaming universe is preparing marketers for the metaverse

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IAB Anzu

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Left to right: NBCUniversal’s Krishan Bhatia, Ashley Schapiro of American Eagle and Anzu’s Itamar Benedy. Image: IAB.

Brands are tip-toeing into immersive VR experiences, also known as the metaverse, through the gaming world. There are a wide range of options for brands to connect with the otherwise elusive gaming audience.

This led the discussion at IAB’s first-ever PlayFronts, an event dedicated to advertising and partnership opportunities in the gaming industry. The New York event showed marketers a crash course about the metaverse and how games are part of that. The road to games has been widened by powerhouse gaming publishers like Activision Blizzard (acquired by Microsoft in a jaw-dropping deal), media publishers like NBCUniversal and the adtech leaders who are connecting the pipes to playable ads and virtual metaverse activations.

“They say COVID was an acceleration for gaming, I believe this event will be an acceleration for gaming as an advertising medium,” said Itamar Benedy, co-founder and CEO of programmatic in-game advertising platform Anzu. “People who told me three years ago that I have a cool startup, but those geeks locked in their basement aren’t their audience – they’re at this conference, so I guess there’s a change in perception on that.”

Games and gamers are already using decentralized virtual environments And they are a core audience for brands looking for newer, younger customers they can’t find through other channels.

Untapped audiences identify as gamers

“It’s difficult to reach the gaming audience because they aren’t watching linear TV or streaming or other media,” said Zoe Soon, vice president of the Experience Center at IAB.

The gaming audience is also diverse, with 46% of U.S. gamers being female and 71% of U.S. moms playing games. And games become even more prevalent with younger audiences, Soon said. For Gen Z, 80% consider themselves gamers. One study shared at the conference found that only 10% of children ages six to 16 consider themselves not gamers.

Brands like Acura see metaverse activations as a way to reach untapped audiences and new customers. That’s because if you don’t advertise in or around games, you won’t reach many of these gamers.

With high-profile music acts like Ariana Grande and Marshmello involved in the gaming scene and collaborating with gaming publishers, Soon pointed to a broader cultural impact that brands can tap into, as like Balenciaga and Gucci have.

“In-game advertising has the ability to dynamically change the content in the game to personalize at the device level, to sell it in a programmatic way to make the game more realistic,” said Benedy. “It also works within the whole advertising ecosystem around fraud detection, brand lift, brand impact, attention, distribution and even up to offline attribution.”

This year, Anzu partnered with NBCUniversal’s One Platform ad solution, to make gaming part of a holistic strategy. Anzu’s mobile, PC, console and Roblox deployments can now be part of a broader holistic media strategy for advertisers including streaming, audio and out-of-home.


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Key advertisers are aware that gaming is one of the most rapidly-growing media in advertising, said Krishan Bhatia, President and chief business officer, global advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal. He added that they weren’t sure about how a campaign could be executed at scale. That’s where a programmatic partnership comes into play, so marketers have the same control as more established media channels.

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Zoe Soon of IAB. Image: IAB.

As gaming’s role in the ad ecosystem evolves, it offers more control to brands and their programmatic and media buying partners to manage brand safety.

“Leaving aside the ongoing debate as to whether violent content is actually detrimental to brand image, where there’s no conclusive research to show that, gaming offers advertisers so much control in terms of where their ad is placed, frame-by-frame,” said Soon.

Executing a holistic game plan

Bhatia also said that marketers have a great need for premium content, which would include some of the most popular global games and franchises. Alongside that, NBCUniversal’s premium streaming app Peacock is also ad-supported, as opposed to streamers like Netflix.

For brand placements in virtual gaming worlds like Roblox, it’s not just an in-game ad, but instead referred to as an experience – much like an experiential placement at a real world conference or event.

Last month, Anzu helped American Eagle launch a “Members Always Club” activation in Roblox. Specifically, the brand presence was located in a section of the territory called Livetopia. The metaverse promo was timed with a traditional and digital spring campaign featuring tennis star Coco Gauff, actress Madelyn Cline and other influential Gen Z figures.

“If we think about where our audience is, it’s in the metaverse,” said Ashley Schapiro, vice president, marketing, media, performance and engagement for American Eagle. “How do we take our campaign and bring it there? The answer was Roblox for us.”

Schapiro identified Livetopia as one of the top 10 roleplaying experiences on Roblox. This enabled Roblox gamers to visit the American Eagle experience, to play tennis or visit the on-site swimming pool, while also having the chance to try on the entire spring collection with their avatars.

Five million people tried on the collection in a month, Schapiro said. In the spirit of inclusivity, the brand allowed access for free instead of charging Robux, the Roblox currency.

“Gaming can no longer be seen as a fringe activity,” said Soon. “It’s mainstream and it’s everywhere.”


About The Author

datafuelX launches predictive analytics solutions to improve linear TV and
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.


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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]

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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples

Introduction

With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.

Types of YouTube Ads

Video Ads

  • Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
  • Types:
    • In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
    • Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.

Display Ads

  • Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
  • Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).

Companion Banners

  • Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
  • Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.

YouTube Ad Specs by Type

Skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
    • Action: 15-20 seconds

Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
  • Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1

Bumper Ads

  • Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
  • File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 640 x 360px
    • Vertical: 480 x 360px

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
  • Headline/Description:
    • Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
    • Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line

Display Ads

  • Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
  • Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
  • File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
  • File Size: Max 150KB.
  • Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
  • Logo Specs:
    • Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
    • File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
    • Max Size: 200KB.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
  • File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).

Conclusion

YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!

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Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists

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Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists

Amazon pillows.

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.

To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.

Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots

Salesforce’s evolving architecture

It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?

“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”

Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”

That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.

“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.

Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”

Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot

“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.

For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”

Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”

It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”

What’s new about Einstein Personalization

Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?

“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”

Finally, trust

One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.

“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”

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