At the Cannes Lions Festival last week Google announced the launch in beta of its new YouTube Creative Suite of resources intended to enable brands and agencies to test and measure the creative impact of video ads.

The Creative Suite has 3 components:

• Video Experiments is an ad-testing tool for AdWords that measures the impact of creative on awareness, consideration, purchase intent and other KPIs. Google makes the pitch that this tool enables advertisers to shift spend from "non-working" focus groups to "working" media spend in real environments.
• Video Creative Analytics produces segmented customer-retention reports. Functionality to annotate different moments within videos to capture numbers of views will be added later this year.
• Director Mix and Video Ad Sequencing will enable advertisers to create many versions of a base video with many different options for text, sound, etc. and run these ads live to see which combination of elements performs best; and also enable sequencing of series of related pieces of content which combined tell a story. (These features are currently in alpha.)

I've never been a fan of focus groups, so really like the idea of that Video Experiments product. I'll share with you any early-adopter feedback we may be able to find. Stay tuned.