Demand Gen: a mid-funnel growth goldmine unlocked through AI powered creative production

YouTube reaches nearly 60 million people in the UK alone, with YouTube Shorts generating 200B+ views daily worldwide, with  more views on YouTube Shorts than all social platforms combined.

Demand Gen, which operates within Shorts but also across in-stream ads, Gmail, and the Discover feed, is YouTube’s core mid-funnel advertising product that gives brands direct access to these viewing metrics.

But despite incredible reach, an adoption gap exists amongst advertisers, with the majority of Google Ads budgets sitting in Search (50-60%) and PMax (25-30%) while less than 5% of advertisers’ budget sits within Demand Gen.

Below, we explore the why behind the lower adoption rates of Demand Gen, focusing on the creative bottleneck brands face, what they can do to address it, and how Open Partners has solved this challenge for clients to successfully move them up and out the bottom of the funnel and drive rapid, profitable, incremental growth.

Why the mid-funnel, and why Demand Gen?

For years, advertisers have relied heavily on lower funnel performance marketing to yield more immediate results, relying on last click attribution to measure the success of their campaigns.

But with changes to privacy laws, the rise of the zero-click search, and increasing customer acquisition costs, this approach alone is no longer sustainable. Most importantly, as video has become a core language of modern discovery, awareness and consideration, a strictly lower funnel strategy becomes less and less effective.

Today, the brands successfully driving rapid, profitable, incremental growth are those who are effectively tapping into the significant mid-funnel opportunity across Google, Meta, TikTok, and Amazon. Among Google products, Demand Gen offers that opportunity, and it’s huge.

Accompanying its unmatched reach, Demand Gen has demonstrated that it is significantly more effective than legacy Google Display formats, delivering 3-4x higher click through rates, up to a 6x better conversion rate, and stronger conversion and attribution lifts, with full asset campaigns delivering up to a +16% lift in overall conversions compared to traditional display and awareness tactics alone.

Still, for many brands, it remains an untapped opportunity.

Why are so few advertisers maximising Demand Gen?

The direction of travel from Google (as well as Meta, TikTok, and Amazon) is clear. Video is not just important for performance, but critical. And for the most watched platform in the world, it presents a massive growth opportunity for brands. So why are so few advertisers truly maximising it?

The prevailing bottleneck is creative production capability. More specifically, the struggle to feed the algorithms with the required creative variety, velocity, and quality that Demand Gen requires to deliver incremental growth.

Starting with variety and velocity, to be successful, a single ad setup within Demand Gen requires a matrix of diverse assets: up to 20 static images, 5 logos, and 5 video variations spanning three distinct aspect ratios. Multiplying those asset requirements across several line items per campaign, many brands (and even agencies) are faced with what feels like an impossible feat when it comes to creative production at scale.

Ensuring their creative is fit-for-platform is another challenge advertisers face. The tempting shortcut (and performance stumbling block) some brands have used is repurposing brand creative (i.e. standard YouTube video ads) in Demand Gen. In Shorts, for example, Demand Gen requires native vertical video in 9:16 (mobile-first). Google will automatically crop or reframe landscape videos to fit the Shorts aspect ratio, leaving users with low quality, unengaging assets that result in poor performing campaigns.

Without the creative capability or the right approach, many advertisers will prematurely abandon Demand Gen before it can deliver its true growth potential, or avoid it altogether.

Solving the creative bottleneck in Demand Gen and beyond

Across all major content platforms, short form, multi format video is now a primary lever in driving algorithmic reach and campaign performance, making creative production a critical capability in driving growth and revenue in modern advertising.

Advertisers will know that traditional creative production is time consuming, expensive, and ultimately not built for this reality. So how can advertisers generate quality creative at speed and scale? As you may have guessed, the solution centres around AI and automation.

To be clear, we’re not talking AI slop. We mean creative experts producing engaging, polished creative that sits firmly within brand guardrails, using AI to improve production speed and deliver the volume and variation the algorithms so demand. Creative that captures attention and carries the user on a journey from awareness to consideration and, finally, to intent.

The human element is critical here. Along with the co-intelligent approach to AI creative production, in which an experienced creative professional remains in control of the input and output, creator content is also key driving real performance outcomes through the major ad platforms. Fitting in natively and drawing in users through snapshots of conversation, UCG is a powerful tool to maximise products like Demand Gen, and while many brands have mastered this across Meta and TikTok, they often forget about Shorts.

The key takeaway here is this: used strategically, responsibly, and skilfully, AI creative production combined with relatable UCG unlocks the growth opportunities within products like Demand Gen, enabling brands to continuously feed the algorithms with engaging creative.

We know this because it’s exactly how we unlock growth through creative for our clients, and why AI creative production at scale is a significant revenue driver for our agency.

Why AI creative at scale is a critical capability for advertisers

Google’s focus on video as a means of delivering growth for brands is not unilateral. Along with them, Meta, TikTok and Amazon (aka the ‘Big 4’) account for 71% of total UK ad spend and, according to YouGov, nearly 80% of consumer attention.

Their algorithms are trained on user behaviour, and through the combination of user data and engaging, fit-for-platform creative, these platforms are offering the biggest mid and upper funnel growth opportunity in the modern advertising landscape.

With bottom of the funnel advertising continuing to deliver diminishing returns for brands, capturing their share of attention on these platforms is critical for growth. In 2026, consumers expect contextually relevant, attention grabbing, fresh creative to build emotional connections and trust in the brands that advertise to them.

Case Study: AI creative production for Autotrader

Our work with Autotrader is a prime example of the rapid, demonstrable effectiveness of AI creative production at scale. Earlier this year, Autotrader joined Open Partners on stage at MAD//North to detail their journey from a performance-focused brand with limited creative to a ‘Mid-Funnel Monster’.

Within 30 days, Open Partners worked with Autotrader to completely transform the scale and variety of their creative assets, taking them from ~30 to 300+ ad variations in a matter of weeks before deploying those ads across paid search and social, successfully moving them up and out of the lower funnel and doubling their baseline leads.

WATCH: Mid-Funnel Monsters: Unlocking the Biggest Performance Opportunity of Our Time