YouTube Wants to Help Creators Ramp Up Brand Deals. Which Means It's Getting More Hands On.
Plus, chasing TikTok Shops
I attended YouTube’s Made On event this past Tuesday, which featured a slew of top creators - everyone from Mark Rober to Dhar Mann to Dr. Mike - as well as press and analysts. While the overall event was centered around showing off a spate of new AI-centric tools for YouTubers, from an ads perspective, a few key messages stood out:
1)YouTube wants to make it easier for creators to both land brand deals, and run lots more of them
The trick for creators, and YouTube overall, is that brands come to creators for their authenticity, their creativity, and their ability to connect with audiences. That often means custom, not-so-quick-to-execute campaigns. There are lots of companies trying to ad tech-ify brand deals - and increasingly YouTube is one of them.
“Accelerating brand deals on YouTube is a top priority for our sales teams,” said CEO Neal Mohan during a keynote.
In addition to BrandConnect (announced at Cannes), YouTube’s just-announced dynamically inserted brand segments tool, creators can now swap out ad integrations in ‘older videos,’ or run alternative creative in other markets. “Historically, all brand deals on VOD are burned in,” explained Michael Beckmann, Director of Product for Data and Creator Payments. “Which means, it’s there forever, it gets stale.”
This makes sense, since while a new fan may discover a three-year-old video from Jaclyn Hill, for instance, the brand integration from that clip may be out of date or irrelevant. So soon, YouTubers will be able to automatically swap those out, sell those opportunities to new advertisers.
On Linkedin, Zack Honarvar, Founder, The Good Internet, called this move ”massive.”
“YouTube just turned creator content into programmatic advertising,” he wrote. “Creator partnerships just became measurable media.”
Yes, but, there’s a bit of a catch, as creators will now have to let YouTube know when and where these deals are slotted. Historically, YouTube hasn’t been involved - but that is gradually changing.
It’s not fully clear how this will work - since so many brand integrations are just that - integrated into content - rather than set aside in specific ad ‘breaks’ - so I wonder just how easy will it be to swap them out for new ones. However, going forward, I could see this tool nudging creators toward more standardized brand integration slots - which can easily be swapped out, or maybe rotate.
In addition, YouTube is also looking to make it easier for advertisers to integrate the data and analytics from their creator integration deals with the rest of their spending and activity on YouTube. As Beckmann explained, “on most brand deals, the way that creators share back data to the brand is they literally…take a screenshot and email that screenshot.”
Instead, they’ll soon be able to connect these to Google Ads, or their own ad buying software through APIs
“We do think that’s a very big step,” said Mohan. “If we can make that process easier and more meaningful for you, that’s good for the overall ecosystem.”
Again, that makes sense - and would maybe help legitimize and accelerate creator spending. But it does change Google’s role in brand deal brokering.
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2)YouTube wants to catch TikTok on Shopping, maybe lap the Chinese app in AI
While TikTok appears to be closing in on sort of becoming a US-run company, YouTube is racing to become more of a shopping vehicle. Clearly, TikTok Shops’ explosion over the past few years caught YouTube, and much of social media, flat-footed.
That’s not to say YouTube doesn’t have an audience for shopping. Millions of people use the search engine for product research, and umpteen creators tout favorite products or brands of their own.
It’s the ‘pulling the trigger on YouTube’ part that the company wants to make more habitual. Not only is YouTube adding retailers like Michael’s and Best Buy into its shopping program, creators can now tag every product they mention, and will get an affiliate fee when people make purchases. Right now, this is free to the 500,000 creators participating in YouTube Shopping, but eventually YouTube will likely take a cut, said Travis Katz, vp of YouTube Shopping..
In the meantime, YouTube is planning to soon bake in Veo 3 in Shorts, making it super easy to churn out fun, original animation. It’s slick, and it potentially puts AI creation in the hands of the masses. That could provide the platform a compelling new edge in the face of TikTok - both for creators and users.
3)Overall, YouTube appears to want to ratchet up its ability to drive performance, and attract performance advertisers
I’ve written about this recently- how YouTube lags behind in capturing performance budgets and ‘long tail’ advertisers. Beckmann addressed this.
“Brand deals obviously do a lot of top of funnel, building the brand,” he said. “Overall in the industry there is more and more lower-funnel conversion-focused activity. What we’re seeing is increased demand for conversion and driving sales through shopping and brand deals.”
“So we are doing some stuff to increase the performance of brand deals, so when they actually happen, they drive the views, they drive the conversion that brands are seeking, which should then bring more demand.”
4)It’s really early for shopping on TV via YouTube. But…
“We haven’t invested in making that shoppable experience very visible yet,” said Task. “We’'ll have more to share on shopping in the living room soon. It’s a great canvas for shopping if you think about the size of the screen. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about what’s the right experience from a viewer perspective and how do you make it easy to buy when you have a remote control as opposed to a phone.”
5)YouTube wants to make it clear - AI isn’t going to ruin everything, and humans are what we’re all about
This came through again and again on Tuesday - a not so subtle message from YouTube execs and creators - as cool as Veo is, as easy to use as some of our new tools are, we’re not going to fill up your feeds with AI slop.
AI is “designed to empower human creativity and storytelling.” said Mohan. “That power belongs to you.”
“It’s never been about the tools,” said YouTuber Brandon B. “AI -does help us move faster, and fail faster so you can stumble on gold faster.”
Added creator Ashley Alexander: “You gotta let creators create.”
Hopefully, mostly human ones.