Why Brand Integrations With Creators Might Not Be Enough
Everyone may have to start paying up
A few months ago I wrote about how Meta is pushing brands to run Partnership Ads to boost creator content, rather than just inking brand deals - and that not everyone was wild about it.
The need for boosting creator/brand integrations via paid media versus just paying to access a creator’s audience and community was also a big topic a few weeks ago at the Scalable Summit in Los Angeles. The consensus seemed to be that the paid media end of the creator economy was growing faster than the paid creator portion.
“Brands are spending more boosting than on creator content,” said Arthur Leopold - CEO & Co-Founder of Agentio. “They are looking to hack the algorithm.”
Then, earlier this week, Jim Louderback wrote the following in Inside the Creator Economy, which really got me thinking:
“Organic virality is on the ropes. The days of partnering with a top creator and leveraging their audience for views are fading. Whether you’re a brand or a creator, you need paid media and other traffic-driving tactics (like clipping) in your toolkit. Betting everything on the algorithm just won’t cut it.”
That sort of flies in the face of how the power of creators is being talked about - especially on YouTube. In that, they have real power and built-in audiences that brands can tap into - regardless of whether brands pay to promote such content.
It makes you wonder what the driving motivation is behind the entire Creator Partnerships program at Google. Naturally, the more that brands work with creators on YouTube, the more they end up spending on YouTube ads - which is good for everybody.
Would YouTube really ‘turn off’ organic reach? I can understand YouTube doing that to brands specifically (much as Facebook encouraged marketers to build up their pages before taking away organic growth to get them to start paying for ads well more than a decade ago). But if you are a fan of someone like Jesser, and YouTube’s content recommendation engine knows that, won’t you keep seeing his videos regardless of whether they feature brand mentions?
I asked Louderback for his take (why come up with my own idea, when I could just riff on his?). He said he’s heard this organic traffic slowdown from both creators and brands.
His theory? There is only so much time in the day, and yet we keep pumping these platforms with more content, including clips of the main stuff. “We have saturated our audiences on the platforms and they are now mature media,” he said.
Plus, “as AI (and clipping armies) flood the platforms and more people watch that, there’s less time for human creator views.”
Or will boosting have to be part of every creator deal? How does that change the economics of YouTube marketing and content creators? Does that mean less money for creators themselves, since brands won’t love having to pony up twice?
Or is this all part of the deal? Among the reasons more creators and brands are baking in ad boosts are the “unpredictability of algorithms” and the need to “guarantee reach and performance goals. Paid media is a scalpel not a hammer.”
This will surely be a big topic, among other things, next week at YouTube HQ, as Cadent and I co-host an event focused on the YouTube/CTV/Creator ecosystem.
Get in touch if you’re interested in attending on June 11 in NYC.
Oh and Knicks in 6.
This feels like deja vu. There have been times when companies thought their story was so good they could survive on PR. Over time, they discovered that they needed to amplify their story with paid media. Same thing with search. SEO tapped out and paid search became an important part of their arsenal. Reach is important. Paid media helps to achieve that when a creator, even if their audience is large, might not totally penetrate a market.
I read Jim's piece and while he might be right about advertisers paying to expand the reach of their creator partnerships -- and that 'organic virality is on the ropes', I think he's missing the point. The value for an advertiser in a creator partnership is the engagement and passion that the audience has for that creator.
If you want more reach, partner with more creators. Or call up Channel Factory or Vue Planner or Zephyr -- they'll gladly curate a bunch of brand safe contextually relevant creators.