• by Alex Weprin , June 19, 2018

The Google-owned video site YouTube still sees 70% of its watch time on mobile devices, but the fastest-growing category of platforms is connected TV devices, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Wojcicki, speaking at the Cannes Lions festival in France, said the platform’s 1.9 billion users watch 180 million hours of content on connected TV devices each day.

Speaking to an audience of marketers and advertising executives, Wojcicki also needed to address the elephant in the room: The company’s issues with brand safety in recent months, and the efforts to make its platform safe for brands and measured accurately.

"No matter how much measurement we offer, everyone wants more,” she said.

“There’s no playbook on how to have content and policies for the scale that we operate,” Wojcicki added in a reference to brand safety. “The way that I think about it is — it’s very important that when we look back at this event, when we look back at this time in history, we are on the right side of history.”

Following Wojcicki’s presentation, YouTube Music chief Lyor Cohen took to the stage to tout the company’s new music efforts, which launched this week.

Cohen acknowledged the music industry and YouTube have had an occasionally turbulent past, but added: “I’m feeling that we have a new love affair.”

Cohen revealed that YouTube’s promotional push for YouTube Music will be “the largest marketing campaign” for the company.

“They’re not going to spend the money on a marketing campaign if they did not love the product,” he added.