Moving past its beta stage, YouTube is slowly rolling out Shorts ads for advertisers, allowing them to tap into the platform's wide audience.
PPC specialist Kristian Maltzahn was one of the first to spot the new feature and took it to LinkedIn to share the good news with fellow marketers.
While YouTube stated the feature won't be available yet for all accounts, more advertisers have reported to receiving the option to choose the Short ads video format for their ad campaigns and combine them with in-stream and in-feed ads depending on their goals.
For users to utilize the new feature, they can head to Create Campaign, choose "Create a campaign without a goal's guidance," select Video and finally Efficient Reach.
YouTube Shorts Ads Are a Game Changer for Marketers
With YouTube announcing earlier this year its efforts to push the video format forward, incorporating ads into Shorts comes as no surprise.
Shorts ads were first introduced into Video reach campaigns in May as a way of helping "brands of all kinds stay relevant and connected with today’s viewers.”
"The new YouTube Select lineups are Shorts-specific. And with the evolution of Video reach campaigns, advertisers can opt in to just Shorts or other surfaces, should they choose," Google told Search Engine Land.
The streaming giant also introduced AI-powered features that help creators use their existing horizontal videos to be optimized for the vertical screen and gave advertisers the option to have their ads run at the start of Shorts viewing sessions.
With more format options to choose from, advertisers can create content that caters to more specific audiences while utilizing the 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users of Shorts.
"The Shorts format opens up for a whole new way of approaching YouTube Ads. YouTube ads have for a long time been a platform for TV-quality advertising, which is of course really interesting and still very relevant. However I think the demand from consumers is changing," Maltzahn concluded.