Google Announces Plan to Migrate Video Action Campaigns to Demand Gen
Olivia Kory, Head of Strategy
September 6, 2024
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn. It has been edited and updated for clarity.
YouTube ad buyers got rocked with big news on September 4, 2024, as Google officially announced that YouTube Video Action Campaigns (VAC) will be migrating to Demand Gen campaigns in March 2025. Demand Gen campaigns serve image and video assets on YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Google Video Partners inventory.
Industry buzz around the news quickly followed: Is this PMAX 2.0 or an actual upgrade? Will YouTube performance efforts get rolled into a PMAX or UAC style of automated buying where brands provide the black box assets and a performance goal without control over the inventory?
For now, the transition to Demand Gen shouldn’t be too dramatic. If brands decide to only include video assets (not images), in theory, the product should work similarly to VAC. That said, Google is pushing hard to include images for optimal performance. But advertisers need to be careful here — last-click attribution may seem to improve, but that’s why incrementality testing is so important: brands just won’t know what’s incrementally impactful otherwise. And as changes like this continue to roll out periodically, testing — whether it’s Demand Gen or PMAX or whatever channels and tactics are relevant for your brand — becomes an increasingly essential part of the savvy advertiser's toolkit.
Automated ad platform products are likely the future, but in the short time since Google’s announcement, it’s become clear that advertisers are pining for a more clear and nuanced view of this change — and they deserve one. As Meta rolls out incrementality-based bidding and more flexible 3rd-party integrations, Google seems to be offering more questions than answers.
How the shift from VAC to Demand Gen ultimately shakes out remains to be seen — but that’s where incrementality testing can add value and clarity. For YouTube advertisers, it’s never been more important to test Demand Gen ahead of this change.
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