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Story ads turned into YouTube ads
The template app
The best-performing YouTube ads are 16 by 9, and many teams avoid YouTube because their UGC program only produces story placements. Victor had its own product build an app that places a story video into a static template, with the video as the replaceable asset. Every one of Victor's story ads ended up on YouTube. Not all worked the same, and each needed a little editing to fit the format.
The same result comes from making a template in Figma, dropping the video in, and exporting it.
Native YouTube ads
YouTube viewers are there to spend time, so the format has a longer attention span. The ads that feel native read like an organic video: someone describing a hack or use case they just started using and showing how. That is a different script, framing, and way of filming than a Meta ad, and Victor has a separate team that writes and films YouTube videos as an entirely separate program from its UGC.
Why did YouTube settle on 16 by 9?
The 16 by 9 shape became the widescreen standard for high-definition television in the 1990s. Researcher Kerns Powers is credited with proposing it in 1984 as a compromise between older formats. YouTube changed its player to widescreen in 2008. Most monitors, laptops, and televisions now share the same shape.
Where did vertical story ads come from?
Snapchat introduced Stories in 2013 as photos and videos that disappear after a day. Instagram added its own Stories in August 2016, and Facebook, WhatsApp, and others followed. The format is vertical and full-screen because it was designed around a phone held upright. Advertisers later got story placements as ad slots between people's stories.
Why do YouTube viewers watch so long?
YouTube said in 2017 that people watched over 1 billion hours of video on the platform every day. A growing share of that viewing happens on television screens, where people settle in for longer sessions. Longer sessions give an ad more time to be watched in full. YouTube's recommendations also queue up the next video automatically.
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