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Join Google’s Ads Product Liaison, Ginny Marvin, as she sits down with Product Manager Alejandro Osio to unpack the creative playbook behind winning Demand Gen campaigns.
Episode overview
Producing a steady stream of high-impact video and image assets for YouTube can feel like the biggest thing standing between you and your first Demand Gen campaign.
The good news is that the creative you already have is a stronger starting point than you might think. You don’t need a perfect set of bespoke YouTube assets to get going, you just need to know which gaps to fill and how.
In this episode:
- How to lift and shift the creative you already have: Bring over what’s already running on social, use your website imagery as a base, and let tools like Asset Studio fill the gaps from there.
- Tips for Asset Studio and multimodal video creation: Prompt and give feedback the same way you’d brief a creative team, then iterate scene by scene.
- Data-driven asset fatigue and refresh rules: Why you should skip refreshes on a fixed schedule and let asset reporting guide you, layering in fresh creative alongside proven performers rather than swapping them out prematurely.
- Structuring an effective testing strategy: How a steady, quality-focused rollout tends to be more effective than flooding campaigns with new assets in bulk.
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Additional resources
Explore the Demand Gen Drops hub
Discover the latest launches, news and best practices for Demand Gen.
access the official announcements and guides you need to build higher-performing assets faster.
Transcript
Alejandro: One thing I’ve learned is that when we talk about asset testing, different advertisers use the term to refer to different things. The best approach really depends on your goal. So what do I mean by that?
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Ginny: I’m Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google, and this is Ads Decoded. We are talking about Demand Gen campaigns in this episode and the critical role of creative. Demand Gen is a really good complement to Search and Performance Max as it helps advertisers create and convert incremental demand with performance ads across YouTube and Google’s most visual services.
If the idea of producing loads of high-impact video or image assets for YouTube feels overwhelming, or if you’ve got questions about asset testing, this episode is for you. I’m joined by Alejandro Ossio. He’s a Product Manager specializing in Demand Gen and YouTube performance ads. He busts myths on asset testing, asset fatigue, and shares how the very latest tools can help simplify your creative process.
Let’s dive in.
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Ginny: All right, welcome, Alejandro. I’m really excited that you are here joining us to talk about creative in Demand Gen campaigns. Why don’t we just dive right in? I want to start high level: how important is creative for success in Demand Gen?
Alejandro: I definitely see creative as now one of, if not the most critical lever to drive strong results for your business. In terms of what works well, I would say a few things. Number one, cover the basics. What I mean by that is make sure you’re adding images and videos across aspect ratios. We have Ad Strength, of course, as this diagnostic indicator, and I always say aim to achieve at least Good, if not Excellent, Ad Strength across all of your Demand Gen ads.
Ginny: Yeah, just on Ad Strength, because we get questions about this a lot regarding what it is actually indicating. You just said it, but I want to double down on that: it indicates that you’re set up for success from an asset variety standpoint, correct? And that’s how it works for Demand Gen as well as Search.
Alejandro: Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. Think of it as just your indicator to understand if your ad is covering the breadth of inventory that Demand Gen offers.
Ginny: Going back to whether you should be creating ads custom for Demand Gen or repurposing existing assets: how are things working there?
Alejandro: Bring your social assets over to Demand Gen. As we say, lift and shift. There is no need to wait until you have the perfect set of bespoke assets for YouTube. This is a great base to go ahead and get started with Demand Gen.
At the same time, we offer a really powerful suite of tools to help you adapt what you have to really thrive on YouTube, whether you want to edit them more manually or turn on asset optimizations that do it for you automatically.
Ginny: For advertisers who are feeling on the edge about adopting or trying out Demand Gen, whether because the creative requirements feel overwhelming or they are new to YouTube: how can these tools help marketing teams ensure that they have the creative assets they need to be successful with Demand Gen without being overwhelmed?
Alejandro: We’ve built these tools specifically to reduce the costs and burden when it comes to producing the variety of creatives that Demand Gen can serve on. When I say give us your social assets, use that as a base. You presumably have some beautiful creative from your website.
This is all very much a strong enough starting point. We’re progressively layering in and making improvements to our asset generation and automation or enhancement suite of tools just to make that coverage flow even easier.
Ginny: And what if they don’t have a beautiful website? What if they’re a B2B company or visual assets aren’t necessarily their strong suit, but they know that people are doing research and scrolling on YouTube and want to be there to drive awareness and engage with prospective customers? What creative tips would you have for those businesses?
Alejandro: The customer you’re describing really speaks to me as a great fit for Asset Studio, since that’s where you can go in, talk about your brand, talk about your message, give some creative guidance, and come out the other end with a beautifully produced video.
Ginny: I feel like our tools are at a place now where these limitations that marketers might have felt even a year ago are becoming much less of a barrier to entry for surfaces like YouTube.
We often talk about the need for asset variety for successful Demand Gen campaigns, but how real is asset fatigue on YouTube?
Alejandro: We certainly get a lot of questions about how frequently assets need to be refreshed to keep fatigue at bay on Demand Gen. As much as I’d love to be able to give a definitive number, when we look at the data, we find that the answer really depends.
It depends on a variety of factors like the type of asset we’re talking about, what inventory it’s serving on, and the particular behaviors for your audience.
With that in mind, I would actually recommend against setting a blanket rule for your business on how frequently to replace assets.
Ginny: What is the best way for marketers to understand if their assets are working or if it’s time to switch them out?
Alejandro: The best way is actually to look directly in asset reporting and examine the stats for your assets. Is there a declining trend relative to when you first added that asset? If you see that it is markedly declining relative to how it was performing when it was fresh, that’s a good indication that it is a stronger candidate to consider swapping out or replacing.
I would also add, though, that it’s generally better to keep it in if it is still showing strong serving and traffic.
Ginny: In that case, would you say keep the one that is still serving and has some performance, and then add a new asset to the mix?
Alejandro: Yes. If you have fresh assets to add and there’s room in your ad to layer those in, definitely do that. The only time where it makes sense to actively remove or replace assets is if you’re already at capacity within your Demand Gen ad and a specific asset has shown a significant decline in performance relative to its start.
Ginny: On asset testing: what does a successful asset testing strategy look like for Demand Gen campaigns?
Alejandro: What I’ve learned is that when we talk about asset testing, different advertisers use the term to refer to different things. The best approach really depends on your goal. If your goal is to refine and refresh one of your existing campaigns, my top recommendation is to make your creative changes more gradually.
For example, you want to make sure you’re keeping your top-performing, highest-traffic assets running when you add new assets in. This helps keep performance stable while the system ramps up on any new inputs you’ve added.
When you’re testing creatives in bulk, I recommend focusing on asset quality over extreme quantities. Keep in mind that the more assets you have in your campaign, the more time and budget you likely need to reach a clear conclusion.
Suppose I set up a Demand Gen campaign with a $100 daily budget, which is our minimum best practice. If I then add tens of thousands of non-feed images and videos to it - and I say non-feed because with a retail feed we’re dealing with much larger volumes and our systems are built for that - the system is not feasibly going to be able to explore all of those assets quickly, since its primary objective is to deliver performance against your set goals. Naturally, the larger your budget per asset, the better positioned your campaign is to more quickly and completely test all the creatives you’ve provided.
Ginny: That’s very helpful and a little bit different than recommendations on the Search side. It’s very helpful for folks new to Demand Gen to keep that in mind, and certainly much less intimidating if creative feels like a barrier to entry. We’re talking about these video and asset enhancements. What is the full set of features available from an enhancement standpoint?
Alejandro: On asset optimizations for video, we have generating videos, shortening videos, and resizing videos - all meant to adapt and generate specifically for video. On images, we have adaptive layouts, which, for example, takes a square image and extrudes it out to fit natively on vertical. We have landing page previews, which enable viewers to get a sneak peek into your landing page. We also have animated images in beta, which add motion effects to your images on Display inventory. Lastly, on text, we have generated text.
Ginny: How should teams integrate these tools into their day-to-day workflows?
Alejandro: We’re continuously adding capabilities to these tools and making them more easily discoverable by design. Build a habit of trying them out.
Ginny: What does a quality assurance process look like to ensure that creatives are maintaining brand standards?
Alejandro: To make quality assurance a little easier, I have two tips. Number one, we recently launched shareable previews. Advertisers can now not only see previews directly in the Google Ads UI, but can actually create and share a link of those previews to show how their ads will look with the assets and other inputs provided. This is great to get your Demand Gen ads reviewed with creative production teams and other stakeholders who need to approve them before running.
My second tip for asset optimizations is that you can review the asset variants that Google AI has generated within asset reporting, and decide whether to keep them in or pause them. Definitely make the most of that.
Ginny: If you’re working with clients or you’re in a business where brand requirements are relatively stringent, making that QA process part of your regular workflow is certainly going to be a must if you’re using enhancements.
Alejandro: Certainly.
Ginny: Multimodal video creation in Asset Studio is now generally available, which essentially allows you to go from storyboarding to generating vertical and horizontal assets in one workflow. It’s awesome for simplifying the creative process—as long as those outputs meet stakeholder expectations and drive results. What tips can you provide for helping advertisers generate high-quality videos that perform?
Alejandro: This is a big one. It’s a feature the team has been hard at work on and we’re super excited that it’s now available for Demand Gen advertisers, especially for advertisers who have a great website and beautiful photos, but maybe haven’t yet invested in video production.
This is actually the first time Gemini Omni has made it into Google Ads, using the latest models and taking your existing creatives and URL as inputs. As far as tips, I was actually using it yesterday to help my cousin set up her Demand Gen campaigns for the first time, so I have a few personal ones from experience.
The first one is, quality in, quality out: The flow we’re providing is prompt-based. Make sure you’re giving Omni as much thoughtful input as possible. Treat the process the same way you would give feedback to your creative production team. That directly leads to better output.
The second is iterate: If something doesn’t look quite right to you, refine it. You’re in control. You can go into the storyboard and edit scene by scene. Take advantage of this, learn through trial and error, and get great results.
Ginny: I love the tip of just communicating like you’re talking to your designer on a normal day-to-day basis. To wrap up, I’ve got two scenarios for you. First, for an advertiser already running Demand Gen campaigns: what are the top three action items they should execute right away to level up their creative performance?
Alejandro: Number one, aim to cover the basics. Make sure you’re adding images and videos across aspect ratios and achieving at least Good, if not Excellent, Ad Strength across all of your Demand Gen ads.
Number two, the way to do that is actually bring your social assets over to Demand Gen, as these are really a great starting point for asset variety as a base.
Number three, also to help you do that, is to make the most of our new creative generation and optimization tools. Visit Asset Studio and toggle asset optimizations on. Doing this will help you much more easily fill any creative coverage gaps and will help you build beautiful creative that looks and sounds made for YouTube.
Ginny: Would you say that video enhancements are something to test even for those with robust creative budgets who have a wide breadth of assets, or is it really geared towards folks who are not able to fill all those requirements on their own?
Alejandro: I would say it’s absolutely worth testing regardless of your creative inputs, since we’re really generating creatives on your behalf with the goal of optimizing your campaign.
Ginny: And just to emphasize: they are still grounded in your original assets when enhancements are turned on.
Alejandro: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the control. These video enhancements use your creative inputs as a base, so they are purpose-built to generate on-brand creative variants.
Ginny: Last question: for an advertiser brand new to Demand Gen who has been thinking about it, what do they need to have in place before they launch their first campaign?
Alejandro: A few things. Number one, data strength. Data is crucial. Make sure you’ve set up Google Tag Gateway, linked your CRM via Data Manager, and enabled Enhanced Conversions, since this all helps pass high-quality signals directly to Google AI. If you have the right measurement foundation, you’re really set up for success here.
Number two is targeting. Upload your first-party customer data as an audience seed list and turn on Optimized Targeting to capture high-intent net new users.
Last but not least, factor where we started: it’s all about creative variety. Make sure you upload across the range of aspect ratios—horizontal, vertical, and square—for both image and video assets, and lock in Excellent Ad Strength across all your Demand Gen ads.
Ginny: All right. Well, great. Thank you so much. I know we’ve touched on and dove into Demand Gen in other episodes, but really wanted to be able to focus specifically on creative and the capabilities, requirements, expectations, and things people should be keeping in mind to really get the most out of their Demand Gen campaigns. So, Alejandro, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise.
Alejandro: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
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Ginny: A big thank you to Alejandro for joining me to break down some great tips on how to get the most out of your Demand Gen creatives. He left us with some good action items and takeaways.
He also mentioned Optimized Targeting at the end. To add some more detail on that: Optimized Targeting uses your campaign conversion data and provided audience segments, custom segments, and/or customer data segments to find additional people who are predicted to convert. You can set audience exclusions as needed, and optimized targeting traffic is reported in the total expansion and optimized targeting row in your Google Ads account. It’s on by default in Demand Gen campaigns and can be managed at the ad group level.
Lastly, in our previous episode, we touched on why data strength is so critical for Demand Gen in particular. Make sure your measurement foundation is solid: set up Google Tag Gateway and link your CRM via Data Manager to ensure you are passing those critical signals back into your account for optimization.
Thanks for tuning in to Ads Decoded. Until next time!
