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New ways to help you drive performance with Demand Gen
In today’s complex digital landscape, consumers turn to visual-first content to get ideas and inspiration across platforms. To stay relevant, brands need to show up when and where it matters most to their audience.
YouTube, for instance, fosters deeper connections than traditional social media. In fact, Gen Z viewers rank YouTube #1 when it comes to feeling like they’re doing something quality with their time,1 and 61% of Gen Zs agree they feel closer to creators they watch on YouTube than on other platforms.2 This translates into strong results: a Nielsen analysis found that YouTube delivers 2.3x higher long-term ROAS than paid social.3
In 2023, we launched Demand Gen campaigns to help businesses build deeper engagements with potential customers and boost online sales and leads. Demand Gen helps you create and convert demand on YouTube and Google’s most visual, immersive surfaces when consumers aren’t searching for you. It offers AI-powered features with flexible controls to connect your business with the right customers wherever they are in their buying journeys.
Today, we’re introducing new ways to help you enhance your Demand Gen campaigns — including expanded controls to customize campaigns for specific channels, new creative enhancements, and richer product and in-store details in your ads. We’ll also share an update on the upgrade timeline to transition your Video Action Campaigns to Demand Gen.
Control where your ads appear
We’ve heard from many of you that flexible controls are crucial for AI-powered campaign optimization. Building on the success of creative preferences and an early experiment, we’re expanding channel controls to all available ad surfaces in Demand Gen globally starting in March. With channel controls rolling out as a beta to everyone, you’ll be able to precisely choose where your ads appear across YouTube, Discover and Gmail — including the ability to tailor your Demand Gen campaigns to serve specifically on YouTube Shorts.
Additionally, we’re adding Google Display inventory to Demand Gen to help you stay top-of-mind with more customers wherever they are browsing content — reaching over 90% of the global internet population across more than 3 million sites and apps.
You can precisely choose where your ads appear across YouTube and Google with channel controls in Demand Gen.
To maximize reach, we encourage all advertisers to take advantage of the full inventory in Demand Gen to fluidly optimize across channels. Learn more about the benefits of cross-channel optimization here.
Multiply your creative impact
Compelling creatives fuel successful campaigns. This requires a strong variety of assets that meet the specifications of different inventory and formats so you can show up when it matters — and that resonate with the diverse needs and interests of your customers. To help you craft stronger ad creatives, we’re introducing more ways to tailor your assets to different screens and formats:
- Demand Gen offers various video and image formats to help you craft unique brand stories on YouTube. Starting in late February you can also run 9:16 vertical image ads on Shorts to create a more immersive, full-screen experience.
- Last November, we launched video enhancements in Demand Gen, allowing you to flip your original video and create new videos in different aspect ratios. In the coming weeks, we’ll roll out a new feature to help you create shorter versions of your videos at scale.
Create shorter versions of your videos at scale with new video enhancements.
You’ll also find an improved ad creation flow in Demand Gen. You’ll now have the option to select the specific types of video enhancements that you’d like to apply to your ads to maximize the variety of your video assets. If needed, you can opt out and manually edit your videos directly in the flow. And you can now share ad previews with your creative stakeholders outside of Google Ads to make the feedback and approval process more efficient.
Drive sales with a more seamless purchase journey
Next, we have new features coming specifically for retailers to help you drive more sales throughout the purchase journey and create a smoother online-to-offline shopping experience:
- For advertisers with a Google Merchant Center account, we’re rolling out a new experience in Demand Gen with product feeds in a few weeks to unlock deeper product discovery. Customers can instantly access full product details directly from your ads, seamlessly transitioning from one product details page to another.
Get full product details directly from your ads with improved experiences in Demand Gen with product feeds.
- With local offers for Demand Gen with product feeds, you can show real-time local product availability, connecting online shoppers with your physical storefronts and driving them to nearby store locations. Then, maximize your omnichannel strategy by optimizing for both online sales and in-store visits with omnichannel bidding.
Contact your Google account team today to learn more about the beta for both features.
Show real-time local product availability in your ads with local offers.
Compare performance across platforms
Lastly, we’re introducing new reporting columns in Google Ads to help you better understand how Demand Gen campaigns perform compared to your paid social efforts and how they inform budget decisions. These columns, which have started to roll out to advertisers globally this month, will include view-through conversions to align with how social advertising platforms measure performance. They will also isolate the impact of Demand Gen from other Google campaigns to provide a more comparable view across channels.
Check out important upgrade milestones for Video Action Campaigns
Last year we announced the upgrade of Video Action Campaigns to help advertisers access the same and even more new features through Demand Gen. Many advertisers are already seeing better performance after transitioning to Demand Gen. Based on a Nielsen analysis, on average, Demand Gen delivers 58% higher ROAS than Video Action Campaigns.4 That’s why we’re taking the next steps to help simplify the process to upgrade.
If you currently use Video Action Campaigns, here are some key upgrade milestones and answers to important FAQs:
- Starting in April, following the launch of channel controls, you’ll no longer be able to create new Video Action Campaigns in Google Ads and Display & Video 360 platforms. We recommend that you start upgrading to Demand Gen yourself before the automatic upgrade goes into effect starting in July to maintain full control of your campaigns.
- Use the upgrade tool (available in March) to apply your historical settings and learnings from Video Action Campaigns to your new Demand Gen campaigns. This helps you upgrade while maintaining your existing strategy and driving consistent performance. Your new Demand Gen campaigns will continue to serve only on YouTube and Google video partners (if you’ve opted-in) until you adjust the settings. While channel controls in Demand Gen will be released as a beta in March, you will be able to continue serving only on YouTube just as you can do today in Video Action Campaigns.
- To instantly access new and expanded features in Demand Gen, such as a wide range of inventory and lookalike segments, we recommend creating new Demand Gen campaigns, or using the copy-and-paste tool to upgrade today. Check our FAQ page for more guidance.
- Starting in July, we will auto-upgrade any remaining Video Action Campaigns in Google Ads. This upgrade process may take a few months to complete and not all accounts will be upgraded at the same time.
- Your historical learnings in Video Action Campaigns will be applied to your new Demand Gen campaigns to help maintain consistent performance. Your inventory settings will be preserved, ensuring your ads continue to serve only on YouTube and Google video partners (if you’ve opted in) until you adjust the settings.
Marks and Spencer (M&S), a global clothing and homeware retailer, saw big success using Demand Gen to drive better results. Partnering with Incubeta, M&S tested Demand Gen and exceeded their forecasted ROAS by 186%, with a 66% lower CPA. The campaign also performed favorably compared to their paid social campaigns.
To learn more about how to upgrade Video Action Campaigns to Demand Gen, visit our FAQ page. To learn more about how you can drive performance with Demand Gen, check out our best practices guide.
MTN Nigeria today held the opening ceremony for the 2025 edition of 21Days of Y’ello Care, the company’s annual employee volunteerism initiative.
This year’s campaign, themed “Connecting at the Roots – Connecting Communities through Digital Tools,” will run from June 1 to June 21, 2025, and focuses on supporting communities that continue to face barriers to digital access and connectivity.
MTN Nigeria kicked off on Sunday June 1 with trainings across different locations in Lagos where staff of the company volunteered to delivered training in valuable areas such as digital marketing and personal branding and employability skills.
In line with the Group-wide campaign theme, MTN Nigeria is implementing a series of grassroots initiatives aimed at expanding digital inclusion and connectivity in underserved areas.
Planned activities include equipping schools and community youth centres with devices, digital literacy workshops, deployment of community Wi-Fi access points, support for digital entrepreneurship and the establishment of an all-in-one Y’ello Pods across the country that will provide a digital hub for learning and support financial inclusion.
Speaking at the opening ceremony held in Lagos, Karl Toriola, Chief Executive Officer, MTN Nigeria said, Y’ello Care matters to us because we’re a digital company and we’re operating in an environment where there are so many needs. At MTN Nigeria, we care, and we want to show our direct connection and responsibility to the communities we operate in.
Now in its 18th year, Y’ello Care is a groupwide flagship MTN employee volunteering initiative that encourages MTNers to volunteer their time and expertise to support positive social change.
The campaign reflects MTN’s purpose to enable the benefits of a modern connected life for everyone and is anchored in the company’s core values.
In 2024, in a remarkable demonstration of corporate volunteerism, MTN staff, through the Y’ello Care initiative, reconstructed a school block at Iwerekun Community High School, Lakowe. This effort has restored hope and significantly improved learning conditions for both students and teachers.
For further information, updates on “21 Days of Y’ello Care”and MTN Nigeria’s commitment to social development, please visit yellocare.ng or follow us on social media.
Fresh, on-the-ground evidence from health planners and climate analysts in Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa shows how the Open Buildings dataset, which maps more than 1.8 billion structures, is helping frontline projects close service gaps and strengthen community resilience.
Across the continent, artificial-intelligence tools are graduating from pilots to public-service workhorses, powering everything from crop-price forecasts to live language translation. Open Buildings—developed by researchers at Google Research Africa—is part of that shift, proving that open, locally guided AI can turn sparse data into timely decisions without locking African problem-solvers behind paywalls or proprietary gates.
In Rwanda, the Ministry of Health and Kigali-based Sand Technologies resited rural clinics with help from the dataset. Their new blueprint aims to bring 92% of citizens within a 30-minute reach of care, trimming journeys that put mothers and newborns at risk.
Across Northern Nigeria, epidemiologists at AFENET and geographers from WorldPop uncovered 10,250 buildings, guiding vaccinators who reached 70% of the zero-dose and under-immunized children identified through the mapping in just six months.
Meanwhile, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has already applied this flood-risk modelling in Dire Dawa, Kigali, Musanze, Gqeberha and Johannesburg, combining two-dimensional hydraulic simulations with building footprints to create block-by-block exposure maps.
The need is pressing: Nairobi is still recovering from the May 2024 floods that displaced more than 278 000 residents, while Johannesburg’s rapid growth along the flood-prone Jukskei River continues to heighten vulnerability
These projects tackle challenges felt across the continent. Africa still has about 8.7 million “zero-dose” children who receive no routine vaccines each year, while the urban population is projected to almost double to nearly one billion people by 2035— forcing new homes into high-risk floodplains and informal settlements.
By giving ministries, city engineers and NGOs a street-level view of where communities are growing and how they change over time, the Open Buildings dataset lets limited budgets flow to the people and places that need them most.
Dr Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Research Scientist & Head, Google Research Africa, “These projects show what happens when local expertise meets open, scalable technology: mothers reach clinics sooner, children receive long-overdue vaccines, and city planners get ahead of the next flood.
“We’re thrilled to stand beside partners who turn data into decisive action, proving that AI’s highest calling is to solve real-world challenges.”
From lifesaving clinics to climate-smart cities, these projects show how open AI is fast becoming Africa’s quiet engine for equitable progress.
The Open Buildings dataset—along with sample code, tutorials and its new 2.5D layer—is freely available at g.co/openbuildings.
To deliver simpler, smarter banking solutions, Union Bank of Nigeria has partnered with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) network, a Financial Market Infrastructure that provides hassle-free and convenient cross-border money transfers to some selected African countries.
This revolutionary payment solution for implementing the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is designed to transform how payments are made across Africa.
With PAPSS, customers can send money instantly to Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Djibouti, Nigeria and more African countries in the future.
Using PAPPS offers numerous benefits to customers, including, but not limited to, instant payments or transfers, cheaper foreign transaction costs, no need to source FX, enhanced security, and intra-African trade opportunities.
Commenting on this partnership that goes across borders, Peter Amadi, Head of Transaction Banking at Union Bank of Nigeria, said,
” At Union Bank of Nigeria, we are committed to driving innovation and excellence in banking. Our focus is on providing seamless and efficient banking through simpler, smarter solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers.
“We believe in fostering strong relationships and delivering exceptional value to our customers, ensuring their success in today’s dynamic financial landscape.”
Mike Ogbalu III, CEO of PAPSS, commenting on this partnership, said, “I am very excited and proud to see Union Bank of Nigeria, a bank with over a century of banking legacy, joining the PAPSS network.
“This shows how PAPSS will be a game changer for the continent by enabling infrastructure to spur the growth of intra-African trade and commerce, with the active participation of regional economic communities, private sectors, and other stakeholders.”
Union Bank’s partnership with PAPSS marks a significant milestone in the Bank’s commitment to driving innovation and excellence in banking.
By providing seamless and efficient banking solutions through simpler, smarter means, the Bank aims to meet the evolving needs of its customers.
This collaboration enhances the Bank’s service offerings, fosters strong relationships, and delivers exceptional value to customers, ensuring their success in today’s dynamic financial landscape.
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