Google touts new creative suite for YouTube, ARCore at Cannes Lions

Dive Brief:

Google announced a new creative suite of video creation tools for YouTube at the Cannes Lions advertising festival and in an Inside AdWords blog post.
Resources include Video Experiments, an AdWords testing tool that measures the impact of a video based on metrics like awareness, consideration, purchase intent and more; Video Creative Analytics, which combines audience segmentation with retention reports to gather creative insights; and Director Mix and Video Ad Sequencing, which are currently in an alpha testing phase. The latter offerings let creators make large volumes of custom videos for different audiences at scale and tell stories over a series of ads or content pieces. YouTube also said it will add a function letting brands annotate moments within a video, such as logos or product shots, and then measure impressions at a later date.
Google is also using Cannes Lions to tout ARCore, its augmented reality (AR) platform, and demonstrating how marketers can use it to create branded AR experiences, per a company blog post. The tech company has partnered with Ogilvy and MediaMonks on some AR creative initiatives.

Dive Insight:

With the new creative suite, Google is focusing its YouTube pitch to marketers at Cannes Lions on better testing, targeting and measuring for campaigns, as well as deeper customization. A handful of marketers, including Kellogg and 20th Century Fox, have reported early success dabbling with features like YouTube Director Mix, which look to automate video campaign personalization at scale.

Google building out a YouTube creative suite comes on the tails of Facebook also introducing a slate of new video features this week. The social network added polling and gamification tools that allow creators to integrate polls, quizzes, challenges and more into their videos in a potential strike at both YouTube and also popular gaming apps like HQ Trivia. Some of Facebook's new video features closely resemble what's been available in YouTube's Community tab since November.

The competition between Facebook and YouTube is growing more fierce as the former is ramping up a focus on video content and influencer marketing. Facebook represents 46% of all video ads created, according to Clinch research from March. That share jumps to 74% when stats from the photo-sharing app Instagram, which it owns, are included. YouTube on the other hand, has 41% of the market, per Clinch's estimates.

Google's touting of ARCore at Cannes Lions also comes as the AR development platform faces stiff competition from Apple's ARKit and the Facebook AR Studio. Facebook AR Studio is seen by some as one of the early leaders in an increasingly popular technology field for the immersive camera technology.