Future of TV Briefing: Which agency team(s) should be responsible for YouTube Shorts?

YouTube Shorts may be the most enigmatic media channel for ad agencies today. 

Case in point: Which team(s) within an agency should be primarily responsible for buying YouTube Shorts ads? Here are your choices:

• A) The video team.
• B) The search team.
• C) The programmatic team.
• D) The social team.

If you picked, well, any of them, then you’re right. That’s because there are valid cases to be made for each team.

• The video team: Shorts is part of YouTube, and YouTube is video.
• The search team: Shorts is part of YouTube, and YouTube is part of Google, and Google is search.
• The programmatic team: Shorts ad buying is largely automated.
• The social team: Google’s own sales team has positioned Shorts as a social property to ad agencies.

That last answer would seem to settle the matter. Google says Shorts is social, so let the social team handle it. But that doesn’t really recognize the reality of how advertisers are typically buying Shorts as part of their broader YouTube buys.

“When [Shorts] first came on the scene, it became a very big jump ball because you get phone calls from Google saying, ‘Well, this is social; it really should be social dollars.’ At the same time, you’re having conversations about how YouTube needs to have upfront video dollars. So it’s going a lot of different ways. It kind of has grown octopus arms,” said Leah Askew, svp and head of precision media for North America at Digitas.

OK, there aren’t quite eight different agency teams touching Shorts. But it can definitely be a handful.

“When you look at the teams managing that media investment within a Google environment, it is still a collaborative effort across paid search teams, programmatic media buying teams, integrated media buying teams, video investment leads,” said Skyler McGill, head of programmatic and video at Wpromote.

The issue isn’t so much whether Shorts is social but instead how tied Shorts is to broader YouTube — or even Google-level investments.

“A social team will manage Meta and TikTok, but sometimes YouTube’s managed by a search team or a programmatic team,” said Brian Binder, senior director of TV, audio and display at Tinuiti.

“You still have social-first media buying teams, so they’re generally buying across all social platforms. They’re not usually buying, though, against Shorts content or other YouTube inventory,” said one agency executive.

For the moment, it seems less important for there to be a standard team that handles Shorts across all agencies than for there to be a lead team within individual agencies. That’s the call that Digitas made.

“We called an ‘all hands on deck’ conversation to sort that out within our brand and also across the organization and have agreed that where we buy it needs to take place within programmatic because of the platform and the skills that we already have built there with programmatic, but it’s on us as an investment org to really collaborate strategically with social. So the lanes become blurred,” said Askew.

While Digitas’s programmatic team handles Shorts ad buying, the agency is starting to treat Shorts more and more like social from a creative standpoint. “You really need to be bringing social strategy and social assets,” Askew said.

Other agencies are similarly adopting social strategies for Shorts. Tinuiti’s Binder described this as a “lift-and-shift” strategy. Of course, then if a more social strategy is being applied to Shorts, does that get extended beyond Shorts?

Said Binder, “This leads us to that bigger question where it’s like, how does this fit with your broader YouTube strategy and then how does the YouTube strategy then fit with your search strategy or your streaming and podcast strategy and everything else?”

What we’ve heard

“We don’t have to slap an asterisk next to every YouTube number anymore.”

— Gamesight’s Adam Lieb on YouTube’s viewcount methodology change

Numbers to know

$31.99: New monthly subscription price for ESPN’s Unlimited streaming tier.

14%: Average percentage increase in subscription prices for Netflix, Disney and Amazon in 2026.

~4,500: Number of film-and-TV jobs that could be lost as a result of Paramount’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

2,172: Number of active free, ad-supported streaming TV channels globally.

$400 million: How much TikTok will pay to settle a children’s privacy lawsuit filed by the U.S. government.

20: Number of original episodes that Dhar Mann Studios will produce for Disney.

What we’ve covered

For brands, the creator ambassador is becoming a creator executive:

• In the spring, creator and comedian Jack Shane was made chief creative officer of German candy company Katjes, to help grow it in the U.S.
• Soft drink brand Cool Sips named reality TV star and creator Whitney Leavitt as its chief creative and brand officer.

Read more about creator executives here.

Inside toy brand Sticki Rolls’ YouTube strategy to win over Gen Alpha:

• Sticki Rolls’ growth has largely been fueled by YouTube, where its products appear in videos that have accumulated over a billion views.
• The toy brand has nearly 1.9 million subscribers.

Read more about Sticki Rolls’ YouTube strategy here.

Creators are moving into brands’ AI search playbooks:

• As more people start their shopping journey in AI chatbots, marketers are hoping creators can help put their brand names in front of those shoppers.
• Marketers are still working to find a direct link between creator-led campaigns and AI visibility.

Read more about creators’ role in AI search here.

The winners and losers of YouTube’s view count and monetization overhaul:

• YouTube has changed how it counts views, registering a video view from the moment it starts to play.
• YouTube is also making changes to its Partner Program, increasing the minimum qualification requirements for creators to apply.

Read more about YouTube’s winners and losers here.

Divine, Vine’s spiritual successor, won’t rule out ads:

• While Divine is not officially affiliated with Vine, it is something of a spiritual successor to it.
• Users of it still watch six-second looping videos, plus there’s a “classic” tab where they can browse more than two million original Vine clips the team managed to bring back from the dead.

Read more about Divine here.

What we’re reading

YouTube’s Netflix counter:

Reacting to Netflix’s creator courting, the Google-owned video platform is offering top creators millions of dollars in exchange for exclusive windows and dangling the risk of creators missing out on promotional opportunities if they do deals with Netflix, according to Bloomberg.

Streamers’ aggregation plays:

Netflix has discussed making third-party streaming services, including NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Fox’s Fox One, available through its platform as Amazon Prime Video has done and YouTube is doing, according to The New York Times.

California v. Paramount:

California’s attorney general canceled a meeting with Paramount and called out the company for acting in bad faith as Paramount tries to settle a lawsuit that seeks to block its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to The New York Times.

Nielsen’s co-viewing measurement:

The measurement provider will officially use audio-sensing wearable devices to track how many people are in a room together watching TV for its measurement currency, according to Variety.

Microdramas’ Hollywood pitch:

Six years after Quibi’s billion-dollar flameout, vertical short-form shows are projected to generate $4 billion in revenue outside of China this year, and a host of traditional TV companies and veterans are trying to get in on the action, according to Variety.