• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 13, 2019

Google on Monday announced an advertising tool that will make it easier for marketers to create YouTube ads. The company expects to demonstrate it on Tuesday at Marketing Live.

Bumper Machine, which Google says can help marketers optimize the content of ads and the time it takes them to create video ads, uses machine learning to convert a YouTube video ad with a duration of less than 90 seconds into several distinct six-second bumper ads in minutes. 

The tool analyzes the attributes in the frame of the clip of the ad, such as whether there is a human character in the image or the amount of motion, sharpness of the focus and quality of the framing.

Grubhub shortened two ads with the tool. Both thirteen-second ads were turned into six-second ads by identifying the exact message the brand wanted to convey.

"Bumper Machine enabled greater flexibility by allowing Grubhub to create captivating new video formats from our existing creative,” according to a Grubhub spokesperson. “As a result, we were able to generate short-form videos to leverage as part of our ongoing campaigns."

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates in a study that brands, on average, will increase their digital video spend to $18 million in 2019, with $9.3 million allocated to original content. Average digital video advertising came in at $14.2 million in 2018.

Because the tool is easy to use and focused on improving results, marketers are likely to set higher advertising budgets. Bumper Machine, for example, can be helpful to marketers by identifying the message and what it is possible to convey within the six seconds of the clip, according to Vishal Sharma, VP of product management at YouTube.

Sharma believes that cutting down the video to six seconds helps marketers identify the “well-structured moments in a longer video, like those that contain product or brand information, human faces, motion or contrast” by organizing these moments and bringing them together to generate several different six-second ad variations to pick from, all in a matter of minutes, he wrote in a blog post.

Once the ads have been created, they can be changed with simple edits.