- YouTube revealed new features at its Brandcast event for advertisers and brands
- Its new Buy with Google Pay tool lets you buy products from ads in YouTube’s TV app
- The company also announced two new AI-based features.
YouTube’s TV app is about to get a new feature, but it has nothing to do with improving your viewing experience. Instead, the company wants to make shopping through its ads much more convenient.
At its annual Brandcast event on May 13, YouTube unveiled a series of new features designed to “connect brands to YouTube’s most impactful cultural moments and trending conversations,” the company said in its blog. One such feature is Buy with Google Pay, a tool that will allow you to purchase products “in just two clicks” from ads directly from the YouTube TV app interface on smart TVs and streaming devices.
This marks the next step in the expansion of shoppable ads on YouTube. Last year, the company unveiled its interactive product feed allowing advertisers to list products on the right side of the screen while ads play between videos, allowing you to click on the listing where it will then display a QR code that you can scan with your phone to take you to the purchase link.
Target pain points
With this new feature, YouTube is targeting a problem with TVs, as entering payment information on larger devices can be quite a process. Allowing viewers to purchase through ads using payment information already stored in their Google account removes this problem.
Not only that, but more users are flocking to YouTube’s TV app for wider viewing, which has opened a gap for the company to take advantage of. With more viewers using YouTube on smart TVs and streaming devices, this creates an opportunity for YouTube to bring more advertisers and their products to more people, but it could really take a toll on impulse buying habits.
In addition to the expanded marketing of its TV interface, YouTube is rolling out even more features to go with it, and two of them are powered by AI.
As per YouTube’s announcement, its personalized sponsorship tool uses AI to “dynamically surface videos tailored to a brand’s desired moment.” In other words, brands won’t need to manually select which channels and content categories they want their ads to appear on.
YouTube also unveiled multimodal video creation, which uses Google AI models such as Gemini, Nano Banana and Veo to “go from creative brief to final production with just a few prompts”, eliminating production time and costs.
When it comes to clickable ads in the YouTube TV app, convenience is clearly the selling point here, but the bigger picture is harder to ignore. YouTube isn’t just trying to make ads easier to watch, it’s trying to remove every possible barrier between attention and spending, without ever leaving its TV app.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
