YouTube offers a new more interactive and profitable option for advertisers

For five years, YouTube’s Skippable TrueView ads have allowed users to see five seconds of advertising and then decide if they skip it or continue watching it. Now the Google video platform came up with a new way for advertisers to keep users attention in a more profitable way. The innovation consists in adding interactive cards over the ads so that sellers can include more information related with the brand.”We are attempting to make TrueView an even better creative canvas for brands. Video has always had image, sound, and movement, we are taking it a notch further up with interactivity”, commented Phil Farhi, director of YouTube Ads.Cards can contain information on the brand and their products, a list of related videos, reproduction lists or a link to its website. Previously, YouTube offered notes on the videos, which could only be seen from a computer and were limited to text. TrueView cards work on telephones and tablets and even on TVs connected to the Internet, such as Apple TV. They are also more visually attractive because they contain images and animations.These cards can overload and obscure the ad they are intended to complement, because they take up a fourth of the space of the video. To avoid this problem, the cards will not appear automatically. Users must activate the option to interact with them. Farhi expects brands to adjust to the new format and that they make the most of it.