Google announces new advertising service within videos on YouTube

Google Inc's YouTube is offering a new way for businesses to get people shopping through the video service.

Marketers would be able to buy advertisements to run during product-focused videos, such as a review of a professional camera or someone talking about new running shoes, YouTube said yesterday in a blog post.

The feature would allow users to click on a small icon that would expand to reveal the item's details, such as pictures and prices. Viewers could then click again if they needed to purchase the item on the retailer's site.

Google is investing in new ways to drive shopping-related activities on YouTube as users increasingly turned to its instructional and informational videos while researching items they needed to buy.

Earlier this year the company unveiled a feature for its TrueView ads that allowed businesses to place more information on products within the video promotions.

The announcement of the new YouTube offering coincides with Advertising Week, an annual event in New York that focused on the latest trends and products in the ad industry. YouTube would roll out the click-to-buy service in the coming months.

Google announced the new ad format at the Advertising Week conference yesterday.

The format would allow advertisers to annotate videos that were relevant to their products, to make those videos more shoppable.

The company hoped to leverage the growth of product review videos by offering up ad space within those videos, in addition to the typical pre-roll ads it sold.

The move comes as a response to growing competition from Facebook, which had made massive investments in promoting its increasingly popular video platform – and the growth of users on mobile devices – to advertisers.