- YouTube unveiled new features at its Brandcast event for advertisers and brands
- Its new Buy with Google Pay tool lets you buy products from ads in YouTube's TV app
- The company also announced two new AI-powered features
YouTube’s TV app is about to get a new function, but it has nothing to do with upgrading your viewing experience — instead, the company wants to make shopping through its ads a lot more convenient.
At its annual Brandcast event on May 13, YouTube unveiled a series of new features designed to “connect brands to YouTube's most impactful cultural moments and trending conversations”, the company says in its blog post. One of those features is Buy with Google Pay, a tool that will allow you to buy products “with just two clicks” from ads right from YouTube’s TV app interface on smart TVs and streaming devices.
This marks the next step in YouTube’s expansion of shoppable ads. Last year the company revealed its interactive product feed allowing advertisers to list products on the right side of the screen while ads play in between videos, allowing you to click on the listing where it will then display a QR code for you to scan with your phone to take you through to the purchase link.
Targeting pain points
With this new functionality, YouTube targets a pain point with TVs, as entering payment details onto larger devices can be quite a process. Allowing viewers to purchase through ads by using the payment details already stored in their Google account removes this hassle.
Not only this, but more users are flocking to YouTube’s TV app for bigger viewing, which has opened a gap for the company to take advantage of. With more viewers using YouTube on smart TVs and streaming devices it creates an opportunity for YouTube to push more advertisers and their products to more people — but could really take a toll on impulsive purchasing habits.
Aside from the expanded commercialization of its TV interface, YouTube is rolling out even more features to go alongside it, and two of them are powered by AI.
As per YouTube’s announcement, its Custom Sponsorships tool uses AI to “dynamically surface videos tailored to a brand’s desired moment”. In other words, brands won’t need to manually select channels and content categories where they want their ads to be displayed.
YouTube also unveiled Multimodal Video Creation, which uses Google AI models such as Gemini, Nano Banana, and Veo to “move from creative brief to final production with just a few prompts” — eliminating production time and cost.
Regarding the clickable ads in the YouTube TV app, convenience is clearly the selling point here, but the bigger picture is harder to ignore. YouTube isn’t just trying to make ads easier to watch — it’s trying to remove every possible barrier between attention and spending money, without ever leaving its TV app.
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