Sean Downey on How YouTube’s AI Delivers Ad Results and What’s Next for NFL Sunday Ticket

At its Brandcast TV upfront presentation last week, YouTube accomplished its event goals, sharing the stage with myriads of content creators, such as Zach King and Cleo Abram; showcasing brand case studies with Pepsi and Taco Bell; and closing the show with a performance by Billie Eilish.

The platform also introduced tools to help brands collaborate with their preferred creators through YouTube Select Creator Takeovers. Additionally, YouTube launched a new Google AI-driven format for connected TV using non-skippable assets across in-stream inventory.

ADWEEK has already chatted with WBD, Disney, TelevisaUnivision, Fox and NBCU for our annual post-upfront interviews, and the series continues with Sean Downey, president, Americas and global partners at Google.

Downey explained YouTube’s priorities for 2024, how AI fits into buyer negotiations and what’s next for NFL Sunday Ticket. YouTube also exclusively confirmed to ADWEEK that the platform plans to return to upfront week next year.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

ADWEEK: What were your priorities for this year’s upfront presentation?

Sean Downey: What we’re big on this year is making sure that [advertisers] can see how much viewership has changed in the world and YouTube is a place where people come to be entertained. The big message we were trying to give is we have millions of creators and fans and all the content that we love most, and that makes YouTube unique. Advertisers come to advertise and grow their business. We want to make sure we showcase that through a lot of those great case studies [shown during the presentation] that [advertisers] could in fact grow their business against any outcome that they wanted.

How are the AI announcements factoring into buyer negotiations?

Buyers tell us that YouTube is a must-buy for them; they’re getting a ton of value for it. With AI, we’re trying to make their investment more effective across lots of different buying types. This gives them comfort as they commit more money to YouTube that they can, in fact, deliver better ROI than they did the year before. We’re seeing 3.7 times higher results on spend than manually optimized. When an advertiser sees that, they invest more on [YouTube] because it’s growing their business. Advertisers have learned throughout the last year that if you have a multitude of formats, in length and size, you can find audiences at different parts of YouTube that drive effectiveness, and AI has been the most effective way to do that.

Booking.com is a relevant example. They know that consumers are there on YouTube, and AI helped them find people they didn’t know they were looking for, at the right moment. Because if you’re doing a message for brand versus consideration versus action, it’s different. We’re helping them refine that and then we’re serving them up a piece of creative that is tailored to that.

What’s the early feedback you’re hearing after the upfront event?

What I heard was we had a nice balance between what the content and the culture are like on YouTube. We had a nice balance of showcasing business results that matter … people really loved the case studies. We [also] had a lot of focus on how we can start to drive better performance with some of our technology. People felt that we hit a sweet spot.

What are the updates with NFL Sunday ticket moving forward?

In Year One, the quality of the streams and content was excellent, and the viewership was phenomenal. According to ComScore, about 78% of the audience that saw an ad in the NFL content on YouTube didn’t see that content somewhere else. So, we’re bringing in a very unique audience to both the NFL and advertisers. Now we’re focused on leaning into that culture around the content and building out more content around the highlights and the different creators that can get inside the NFL. That’s what fans are flocking to.

What can you tell us about early negotiations?

We have a lot of buyers on YouTube who are very interested in maintaining their presence on the platform. We’re quite bullish that YouTube is well-positioned as a unique property and platform. That’s really a must-buy and that’s what we keep hearing from people. We expect to have a really successful season and negotiation with ad buyers.

Will you be back at upfront week next year?

We’re planning to be back. You see it in the stats—we’re the number one streamer 15 months in a row and we’re number two on the total media distribution. It’s quite clear that viewership has shifted and YouTube is at the forefront of it.

Can you tell me more about the non-skippable ads—how are buyers responding to that?

Advertisers love flexibility, and they’ve been asking that for a while to have options to drive performance. We are trying to accomplish a couple of things here. One, we want to make sure that the TV experience is really good; it has to be immersive and engaging. So, we’ve been trying to drive a lot of the assets that we’ve used elsewhere and make them TV-ready. We got a lot of great feedback on bringing some of the AI-powered tools to the living room as well. Across the board, all the announcements we had on formats and types were received exceptionally well.