• by Laurie Sullivan , 6 hours ago

Google has brought new media-buying capabilities to YouTube with Google Display & Video 360 (DV 360), part of the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) for programmatic that now spans the company's portfolio of media ad-buying products.

The changes were announced Monday as part of Google and YouTube's NewFronts announcements.

Each focuses on the integration of Google’s Gemini AI model more fully into GMP to help marketers better predict consumers’ next steps as online behavior evolves and to more effectively use agentic technology to match brands with content creators.

Bill Reardon, GM of enterprise at Google Ads, during a media briefing said one reason that "YouTube has seen so much success is because consumers can screen, scroll, shop, and search on one platform," which continues to attract media brands connected to entertainment businesses and sports.

Google has also strengthened its partnership with Paramount to make UFC inventory available through DV 360, and made its live sports biddable suite of tools available on DV 360.

This allows marketers to connect with sports fans as they stream across connected TV (CTV), and then re-engage with them as they scroll for game highlights on YouTube Shorts.

AI is being used to adapt to viewing spikes, and optimize creative in milliseconds to run smoothly.

"YouTube Creator Takeovers," "YouTube creator partnership boost," and "Pause Ads to Display & Video 360" were also announced, to enable marketers to conduct integrated campaigns across the full customer journey.

In early tests, advertisers that added an additional Google Marketing Platform product to their mix saw a 76% lift in ROAS, according to Circana marketing-mix modeling ( MMM) meta-analysis in the U.S.

Melissa Hsieh Nikolic, director of product at YouTube Ads, said in the past four years YouTube has paid out more than $100 billion to content creators to support brands.

The company has now integrated AI into a new platform it calls the “YouTube Creator Partnership,” which matches content creators with brands and manages campaigns, collaborations, and measurements.

Agentic capabilities have been added for brands looking to find the ideal content-creator matches.

In the coming month, advertisers will have the ability to input their brand’s creative brief, and the platform will find the perfect content creators for the collaborative campaign. The system has the capability to match the brand with a creator in an industry they had not thought of working with in the past.

Google has also announced "Confidential Publisher Match," the company's next generation of an identity model to operate in a privacy-first manner. It connects a brand’s first-party data with streaming signals from publishers, like Roku.

This identity model enables brands to reach consumers with precision and tracks the consumer journey from a CTV impression to a final purchase.

The reach of Google’s audience segments in DV 360 has been boosted to 96% of ad-supported CTV households.