This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
Google enshitifying things? Who would have thought? Seriously, it’s as if they want to test how far they can go upsetting users. There’s got to be some (a lot?) of that, for sure.
You’d think so, but a never ending stream of people continue to sit there glued to their phones through content and adverts alike.
We’re probably already at the Demolition Man point of having a station just for adverts.