How YouTube’s New AI Tool More Directly Connects Brands and Creators to Drive Ad Sales

YouTube is making it a whole lot easier for brands to connect to the creators who already love them.

During YouTube’s Newfronts presentation on Thursday, the company unveiled its newly created Insights Finder and creator partnership hub, which use artificial intelligence to more seamlessly connect brands to creators.

“It’s really about doing the heavy lift for routine things that we can use AI for, like really deep insights in order to make ad performance better. Creator matching is a big one,” Melissa Hsieh Nikolic, director of product management for YouTube Ads, told TheWrap.

Out of all the new technologies YouTube touted during the advertising event, arguably the most interesting is YouTube’s Insights Finder. The new tool for advertisers and agencies allows these companies to search YouTube’s content by a keywords, such as “sneakerhead.” The tool then uses AI to comb through the platform’s endless videos and connect that brand to creators whose content reflects that search term. Insights Finder then takes the potential partnership a step further, showing brands specifics about the channels they’re interested in collaborating with, including likes, subscribes and that creator’s most viewed videos from the past month — the three most requested metrics from advertisers, according to YouTube.

After a brand has identified a creator they want to collaborate with, they can then go to YouTube’s creator partnerships hub, which is part of Google Ads, and actually send a request for collaboration to that creator, which appears in their Creator Studio. The creator then sees that request and can either choose to accept or deny it.

The benefit of this new system is twofold. On the creator side, they will no longer have to remember to log in and take screenshots of their audience demographics everyday. And for advertisers, they get the information they want faster while seeing a broader view of how their campaigns are running. These systems will include both longform and shortform content, meaning it will apply to YouTube Shorts as well. Insights Finder can also be integrated into all of the platform’s AI powered campaigns, which include Demand Gen, Video view and Video reach campaigns.

“YouTube is making it easier for brands to hire creators, and, on the flip side of that, it’s easier for creators to get discovered by brands,” Hsieh Nikolic said. “It doesn’t have to be the ones that are the top-of-mind creators for everybody or the top-of-mind brands for the creator. Really it’s about unlocking that ecosystem.”

Making connections between seemingly smaller brands and creators is especially important as there is a great degree of trust between many creators and their audience. A 2021 Nielsen Trust in Advertising study found that 71% of consumers trust advertising, opinions and product placements from influencers.

To that end, YouTube has also unveiled creator Takeovers. This new pilot program will allow creators and brands to partner together on a branded lean-in that will play ahead of videos. “We really do know that creators want their audiences to know that, ‘I support, I endorse and I really like this brand that’s sponsoring me.’ So it’s really about having that little extra hook,” Hsieh Nikolic said.

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