Formats
What specs do you deliver for YouTube video ads?
Short answer: Pluto delivers your finished film in vertical, square, and a paid-ready cut optimized for YouTube's ad specs—16:9 landscape, typically 15–60 seconds, with full sound design and in-video text. You own the files outright, so you can run them on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else without extra licensing fees or format costs.
Why specs matter (and why most studios get them wrong)
A beautifully made video dies the moment it hits the platform if the specs are wrong. YouTube ads need specific dimensions, frame rates, file sizes, and codec settings—miss them and your ad either gets rejected, plays in the wrong aspect ratio, or gets crushed by compression.
Most production studios hand you a beautiful master file and tell you to figure out the rest. You're left hiring an editor to reformat, or uploading wrong and hoping YouTube accepts it anyway. That's friction that costs time and confidence right when you're about to spend money on the ad itself.
What Pluto delivers
The team builds every project with platform specs baked in from the start. Your deliverables include:
Vertical (9:16): For mobile feeds and Stories on YouTube Shorts, Instagram, TikTok.
Square (1:1): Native to feed ads across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
Paid-ready cut (16:9 landscape): Optimized for YouTube masthead, bumper, and standard video ad placements. Full sound design, proper audio levels, color-graded and ready to upload.
Each file is delivered in a format YouTube accepts without recompression issues—MP4, H.264 codec, matching the resolution and bitrate YouTube's system expects. No guessing. No surprises at upload.
The real advantage: you own it all
Because Pluto gives you full usage rights in writing on day one, you're not locked into YouTube. The same video works on TikTok ads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or your own website. No format conversion fees. No "YouTube version" versus "Instagram version" licensing. You paid once for the work; you run it everywhere.
Most agencies either make you re-buy formats or hide that cost in a nebulous "platform fees" line. Here, the specs are part of the deliverable, and the deliverable is yours to use as you see fit.
How the process works
Before the team starts, you and Pluto agree on a fixed quote. During production, the creative team builds with YouTube's ad requirements in mind—length, aspect ratios, text size for mobile, sound levels for users with audio off. You get a first cut in days, then two rounds of changes to get it exactly right. Once you sign off, you have the finished files in all three formats, ready to drop into YouTube's ad manager or any other platform.
Most projects are ready in about a week.
Start here
If you're building a YouTube ad campaign and want to skip the formatting headaches, the team can walk you through the scope and give you a fixed quote before any work begins. Packages start around a few hundred dollars and scale with the complexity of the work—animation, talent, locations, sound design, revisions all factor in.
Reach out with your brief, and Pluto will send you a quote and timeline.