YouTube isn’t satisfied with serving one or two slices of brands’ creator marketing demands. It wants the whole pie.
On Monday, ahead of YouTube’s NewFronts presentation this week, the Google-owned video site announced that it is repackaging BrandConnect, its tool for connecting YouTube creators with brands for sponsorship deals, into what will now be known as Creator Partnerships—and giving it an AI makeover. The platform will be backed by Gemini, Google’s suite of frontier AI models, to intelligently pair advertisers with creators that suit their needs.
“It’s historically been challenging for advertisers to find the right creator to work with and then scale their efforts globally,” said Melissa Nikolic, director of product management for YouTube Creator Ads, on a call with press. Now, she said, the company is integrating Google’s AI spine into YouTube’s suite of creator tools—a change that she expects will “make it easier for brands to discover and work with creators at scale.”
Creator Partnerships will also be integrated with YouTube Studio for creators, Google Ads, and Google’s demand-side platform Display & Video 360 (DV360) into one centralized hub for advertisers.
Within Google Ads or DV360, users can generate a target list of YouTube creators through simple natural language queries.
“You can say, ‘Find me us tech creators reviewing sports gear with high Gen Z retention,’ and our AI will surface creators who match, and will include insights about their channel, their audience, sample videos, and more,” Nikolic explained.
Gemini analyzes billions of data points on everything from brand mentions to subscriber growth to surface these recommendations.
“It’s designed to save time for brands who traditionally have had to manually sift through eligible creators in the YouTube Partner Program, and may have missed some really great creators. It also gives creators of all sizes more opportunities to be discovered,” Nikolic said.
When possible matches are identified, advertisers can then filter down to a shortlist of top picks and reach out en masse to multiple creators at once. Within the platform, advertisers can track and manage their creator deals.
