First - a quick note - an Advertising Week Mixer
I am partnering up with Max Power Gaming’s Stephen Dypiangco - one of my go-to analysts if I want to understand what is going on in the gaming world, particularly Roblox - for a fun drinks event during Advertising Week.
Specifically, we are co-hosting a Gaming-Meets-Advertising Mixer on Monday, October 5 during Advertising Week, sponsored by Super Awesome and Exclusible. We’re going to have drinks and snacks while discussing the state of in-game advertising, as everyone from Roblox to Xbox to EA to Sony seems to be making a renewed play for this sector.
Please get in touch if you’re interested in attending.
Over the past few years, YouTube has been playing a much more active role in the Brand-Creator-Partnership economy.
After going back and forth over the years regarding just how much involvement the Google-owned platform really wanted to have in the sometimes squishy world of brand integrations, YouTube has gone all in, first in unveiling Google BrandConnect at Cannes back in 2025 before rechristening the matchmaking platform YouTube Creator Partnerships - which is baked right into the YouTube Studio tool millions of creators use.
Now it seems that YouTube wants to aim even higher here - and maybe shake up some of the existing YouTube ad ecosystem. At the company’s Made On YouTube event in New York on Wednesday, YouTube Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe mentioned “hundreds of millions of incentives to agency partners.”
Specifically, those incentives will be aimed at reducing the operational overhead and production burden on agencies when they are woking with lots of creators at once - which could threaten to hold back the space.
Instead, YouTube, said Coe, wants to foster “The largest creator economy in the world” by “Backing creators with the highest ad payouts in the industry.”
It’s clear that YouTube isn’t just planning to hand out cash and point people to a creator database. Last week at the IAB’s Inaugural CreatorFront, officials spoke about how advertiser interest in working with creators was outpacing infrastructure - and that someone needs to build - and ideally centralize - the billing, the contracts, the reporting, the deal flow, etc.
It’s starting to sound like YouTube wants in on some, or all of that.
In a follow-up interview at Made, I asked Amjad Hanif, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube Creator Products about the company’s ambitions here.
“Up till now, a lot of those deals happened sort of sporadically and sort of one off communication via email, and DMs, etc.,” he said. “The ecosystem’s quite fragmented and quite complex, and so different advertisers want to work in different ways.”
To help streamline things, “we do actually plan to invest a lot in the tools to connect them, make those deals easier to start, consummate, to be able to boost on top of it. So it’s actually a big area of investment for us.”
That could be great for creators, who are looking for more ways to get paid, and for YouTube - since increasingly, the most that brands ink creator integration deals, the more they pay to boost them with ads.
Yet this could cut into the territory held by the vast array of influencer database firms, YouTube middlemen, and even some big social agencies- depending on where YouTube goes with this build.
“We think that’s good for the ecosystem and good for brands,” said Hanif. “So we do actually plan to invest a lot in the tools to connect them, both for the advertisers, the brands, the agencies working in this, as well as the creators.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that any tools YouTube builds on this front will be used beyond its own borders - I’d doubt that brands are going to look to connect with TikTok or Instagram creators this way. But it could keep more creators and brands in the YouTube ecosystem - which is sort of in Google’s wheelhouse.
“Today, we’re really focused on meeting them where they are and how do they want to interact with us and make sure however they want to interact with YouTube, they can get the tools that they need to be successful,” Hanif said. This all could look “a lot like the ad tech opportunity, maybe 15 years back.”
As Ellen Coe put it earlier to the creator-filled audience, “connecting with brand partners is one of the most transformative ways to build your business.”
Maybe even transformative for the entire creator economy.