• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 6, 2024

Google launched a series of ads introducing Bob, a popular "afterlifestyle" influencer, from the Warner Bros. movie "Beetlejuice" as part of its ongoing campaign titled "New Ways to Search."

Bob navigates the real world with Google’s AI-powered features like Lens, Circle to Search, and AI Overviews. 

The campaign will run across digital and social media — Max connected television (CTV), YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram — through mid-October.

The "New Ways to Search" campaign kicked off last year with creative in culture and current trends to show how visual search can become useful to people in their day-to-day life.

Previous creative in the campaign has featured the "Barbie Movie" and WNBA game day fashion, among other themes.

YouTube began running a series of posts by @YouTubeLiaison Rene Ritchie on the social media site X about a variety of subjects to support YouTube influencers.

One response was to a post asking how some videos with no tags or SEO terms, terrible titles and thumbnails get traction when other well-thought-out, well made, and properly tagged and titled videos die off instantly.

"'SEO" doesn’t really mean much on YouTube,” Richie wrote. “The way a viewer responds to a video means a lot.”

He suggests focusing on a thumbnail that grabs attention, a title that helps win the click, an introduction that rewards the click, a hook that compels attention, and a video that continuously makes good on the promise of the packaging and leaves the viewer so satisfied they can’t wait to watch another one of your videos.

For search traffic, he writes, a thumbnail that stands out from other results, a title that answers the query, an intro that confirms the video will indeed provide the answer, and a video that delivers the answer in a satisfying and interesting way.

Influencer marketing has been key to success for Google’s YouTube. The company worked for years to find the value in influencers and in April 2021, finally managed to figure it out and posted a list of best practices.

The suggestions for influencer marketing included: stop dwelling on impressions because they say little about whether the message resonated, leave earned media behind because they are based on assumptions, and standardize reporting metrics for creator partnerships by focusing on absolute lift, total people lifted, and cost per person lifted to benchmark channels.