Tag Archives: problem solving

Build with Google AI video series, Season 2: more AI patterns

Posted by Joe Fernandez – Google AI Developer Relations

We are off to another exciting year in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it's time to build more applications with Google AI technology! The Build with Google AI video series is for developers looking to build helpful and practical applications with AI. We focus on useful code projects you can implement and extend in an afternoon to bring the power of artificial intelligence into your workflow or organization. Our first season received over 100,000 views in six weeks! We are glad to see that so many of you liked the series, and we are excited to bring you even more Google AI application projects.

Today, we are launching Season 2 of the Build with Google AI series, featuring projects built with Google's Gemini API technology. The launch of Gemini and the Gemini API has brought developers even more advanced AI capabilities, including advanced reasoning, content generation, information synthesis, and image interpretation. Our goal with this season is to help you put those capabilities to work for you and your organizations.


AI app patterns

The Build with Google AI series features practical application code projects created for you to use and customize. However, we know that you are the best judge of what you or your organization needs to solve day-to-day problems and get work done. That's why each application we feature in this series is also meant to be used as an AI pattern. You can extend the applications immediately to solve problems and provide value for your business, and these applications show you a general coding pattern for getting value out of AI technology.

For this second season of this series, we show how you can leverage Google's Gemini AI model capabilities for applications. Here's what's coming up:

  • AI Slides Reviewer with Google Workspace (3/20) - Image interpretation is one of the Gemini model's biggest new features. We show you how to make practical use of it with a presentation review app for Google Slides that you can customize with your organization's guidelines and recommendations. 
  • AI Flutter Code Agent with Gemini API (3/27) - Code generation was the most popular episode from last season, so we are digging deeper into this topic. Build a code generation extension to write Flutter code and explore user interface designs and looks with just a few words of description.
  • AI Data Agent with Google Cloud (4/3) - Why write code to extract data when you can just ask for it? Build a web application that uses Gemini API's Function Calling feature to translate questions into code calls and data into plain language answers.

Season 1 upgraded to Gemini API: We've upgraded Season 1 tutorials and code projects to use the Gemini API so you can take advantage of the latest in generative AI technology from Google. Check them out!


Learn from the developers

Just like last season, we'll go back to the studio to talk with coders who built these projects so they can share what they learned along the way. How do you make the Gemini model review an entire presentation? What's the most effective way to generate code with AI? How do you get a database to answer questions with the Gemini API? Get insights into coding with AI to jump start your own development project.


New home for AI developer content

Developers interested in Google's AI offerings now have a new home at ai.google.dev. There you'll find a wealth of resources for building with AI from Google, including the Build with Google AI tutorials. Stay tuned for much more content through the rest of the year.

We are excited to bring you the second season of Build with Google AI – check out Season 2 right now! Use those video comments to let us know what you think and tell us what you'd like to see in future episodes.

Keep learning! Keep building!

YouTube Ads Creative Analysis

Posted by Brian Craft, Satish Shreenivasa, Huikun Zhang, Manisha Arora and Paul Cubre – gTech Data Science Team


Introduction


Why analyze YouTube ads?

YouTube has billions of monthly logged-in users and every day people watch billions of hours of video and generate billions of views. Businesses can connect with YouTube users using YouTube ads, which are promotional videos that appear on YouTube's website and app, with a variety of video ad formats and goals.

Image of a sample YouTube in-stream skippable video ad
A sample YouTube in-stream skippable video ad

The Challenge

An effective video ad focuses on the ABCDs.

  • Attention: Capturing the viewer's attention till the end.
  • Branding: Helping them hear or visualize the brand.
  • Connection: Making them feel something about the brand.
  • Direction: Encouraging them to take action.

But each YouTube ad has a varying number of components, for instance, objects, background music or a logo. Each of these components affect the view through rate (which is referred to as VTR for the remainder of the post) of the video ad. Therefore, analyzing video ads through the lens of the components in the ad helps businesses understand what about the ad improves VTR. The insights from these analyses can be used to inform the creation of new creatives and to optimize existing creatives to improve VTR.


The Proposal

We propose a machine learning based approach for analyzing a company’s YouTube ads to assess which components affect VTR, for the purpose of optimizing a video ad’s performance. We illustrate how to:

  • Use Google Cloud Video Intelligence API to extract the components of each video ad, using the underlying video files.
  • Transform that extracted data to engineered features that map to actionable business questions.
  • Use a machine learning model to isolate the effect on VTR of each engineered feature.
  • Interpret and action on those insights to improve video ad performance, for instance altering existing creatives or create new creatives to be used in an AB test.

Approach


The Process

The proposed analysis has 5 steps, discussed below.

1. Define Business Questions
Align on a list of business questions that are actionable, for instance “does having a logo in the opening shot affect VTR?” We suggest taking feasibility into account ahead of time, for instance if a product disclaimer is necessary to have for legal reasons, there is no reason to assess the impact a disclaimer has on VTR.

2. Raw Component Extraction
Use Google Cloud technologies, such as the Google Cloud Video Intelligence API, and underlying video files to extract raw components from each video ad. For instance, but not limited to, objects appearing in the video at a particular timestamp, presence of text and its location on the screen, or the presence of specific sounds.

3. Feature Engineering
Using the raw components extracted in step 2, engineer features that align to the business questions defined in step 1. For example, if the business question is “does having a logo in the opening shot affect VTR”, create a feature that labels each video as either 1, having a logo in the opening shot or 0, not having a logo in the opening shot. Repeat this for each feature.

4. Modeling
Create an ML model using the engineered features from step 3, using VTR as the target in the model.

5. Interpretation
Extract statistically significant features from the ML model and interpret their effect on VTR. For example, “there is an xx% observed uplift in VTR when there is a logo in the opening shot.”


Feature Engineering


Data Extraction

Consider 2 different YouTube Video Ads for a web browser, each highlighting a different product feature. Ad A has text that says “Built In Virus Protection'', while Ad B has text that says “Automatic Password Saving”.

The raw text can be extracted from each video ad and allow for the creation of tabular datasets, such as the below. For brevity and simplicity, the example carried forward will deal with text features only and forgo the timestamp dimension.

 Ad

 Detected Raw Text

 Ad A

 Built In Virus Protection

 Ad B

 Automatic Password Saving

Preprocessing

After extracting the raw components in each ad, preprocessing may need to be applied, such as removing case sensitivity and punctuation.

 Ad

 Detected Raw Text

 Processed Text

 Ad A

 Built In Virus Protection

 built in virus protection

 Ad B

 Automatic Password Saving

 automatic password saving

Manual Feature Engineering

Consider a scenario where the goal is to answer the business question, “does having a textual reference to a product feature affect VTR?”

This feature could be built manually by exploring all the text in all the videos in the sample and creating a list of tokens or phrases that indicate a textual reference to a product feature. However, this approach can be time consuming and limits scaling.

Image of pseudo code for manual feature engineering
Pseudo code for manual feature engineering

AI Based Feature Engineering

Instead of manual feature engineering as described above, the text detected in each video ad creative can be passed to an LLM along with a prompt that performs the feature engineering automatically.

For example, if the goal is to explore the value of highlighting a product feature in a video ad, ask an LLM if the text “‘built in virus protection’ is a feature callout”, followed by asking the LLM if the text “‘automatic password saving’ is a feature callout”.

The answers can be extracted and transformed to a 0 or 1, to later be passed to a machine learning model.

 Ad

 Raw Text

 Processed Text

 Has Textual Reference to Feature

 Ad A

 Built In Virus Protection

 built in virus protection

 Yes

 Ad B

 Automatic Password Saving

 automatic password saving

 Yes



Modeling


Training Data

The result of the feature engineering step is a dataframe with columns that align to the initial business questions, which can be joined to a dataframe that has the VTR for each video ad in the sample.

 Ad

 Has Textual Reference to Feature

 VTR*

 Ad A

 Yes

 10%

 Ad B

 Yes

 50%

*Values are random and not to be interpreted in any way.

Modeling is done using fixed effects, bootstrapping and ElasticNet. More information can be found here in the post Introducing Discovery Ad Performance Analysis, written by Manisha Arora and Nithya Mahadevan.

Interpretation

The model output can be used to extract significant features, coefficient values, and standard deviation.

Coefficient Value (+/- X%)
Represents the absolute percentage uplift in VTR. Positive value indicates positive impact on VTR and a negative value indicates a negative impact on VTR.

Significant Value (True/False)
Represents whether the feature has a statistically significant impact on VTR.

 Feature

 Coefficient*

 Standard Deviation*

 Significant?*

 Has Textual Reference to Feature

0.0222

0.000033

True

*Values are random and not to be interpreted in any way.

In the above hypothetical example, the feature “Has Feature Callout” has a statistically significant, positive impact of VTR. This can be interpreted as “there is an observed 2.22% absolute uplift in VTR when an ad has a textual reference to a product feature.”

Challenges

Challenges of the above approach are:

  • Interactions among the individual features input into the model are not considered. For example, if “has logo” and “has logo in the lower left” are individual features in the model, their interaction will not be assessed. However, a third feature can be engineered combining the above as “has large logo + has logo in the lower left”.
  • Inferences are based on historical data and not necessarily representative of future ad creative performance. There is no guarantee that insights will improve VTR.
  • Dimensionality can be a concern as given the number of components in a video ad.

Activation Strategies


Ads Creative Studio

Ads Creative Studio is an effective tool for businesses to create multiple versions of a video by quickly combining text, images, video clips or audio. Use this tool to create new videos quickly by adding/removing features in accordance with model output.

Image of sample video creation features in Ads creative studio
Sample video creation features in Ads creative studio

Video Experiments

Design a new creative, varying a component based on the insights from the analysis, and run an AB test. For example, change the size of the logo and set up an experiment using Video Experiments.


Summary


Identifying which components of a YouTube Ad affect VTR is difficult, due to the number of components contained in the ad, but there is an incentive for advertisers to optimize their creatives to improve VTR. Google Cloud technologies, GenAI models and ML can be used to answer creative centric business questions in a scalable and actionable way. The resulting insights can be used to optimize YouTube ads and achieve business outcomes.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our collaborators at Google, specifically Luyang Yu, Vijai Kasthuri Rangan, Ahmad Emad, Chuyi Wang, Kun Chang, Mike Anderson, Yan Sun, Nithya Mahadevan, Tommy Mulc, David Letts, Tony Coconate, Akash Roy Choudhury, Alex Pronin, Toby Yang, Felix Abreu and Anthony Lui.