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YouTube’s deliberate pace on scalable creator ads raises eyebrows among marketers
As brands increase their spending on scalable creator ads, three marketers say YouTube is lagging behind rival platforms in its implementation of the paid ad format — but YouTube execs insist its slower rollout is designed to protect the platform’s creator community.
Over the past year, social platforms have released more tools to help advertisers scale creator ads, which let brands take an existing piece of creator content like an organic post or video and turn it into a targeted ad without having to negotiate or produce a custom campaign with that creator from scratch. The product names vary by platform — ”partnership ads” on Meta and “Spark Ads” on TikTok — but the goal is the same: let marketers scale creator ad campaigns without cutting dozens of individual sponsorship deals.
“Most advertisers are running paid media, and it’s hard to scalably deploy a full media budget on creators in the same way you can programmatically buy ads at scale,” said Anders Bill, chief product officer of the influencer marketing platform Superfiliate. “If you’re looking at the total addressable market or the size of the creator economy, I would argue that partnership ads are probably the most amount of dollars spent.”
Makeup brand Jones Road Beauty is increasing its spending on scalable creator ads in 2025, according to Jones Road CEO Cody Plofker, who declined to share a specific figure but said that Meta partnership ads currently account for between 30 and 40 percent of the brand’s overall ad spend, with plans to increase that number “10X” in the coming year.
“We are definitely looking into how we can scale this across other platforms,” Plofker said. “YouTube is one where we’ve really only done our internal branded content, and we’re trying to figure out how we partner with creators on YouTube and do the same thing, where we’re leveraging them and their profiles and audiences across YouTube campaigns.”
As brands’ demand for scalable creator ads grows, they increasingly view YouTube as lagging behind other platforms in this arena. Three marketers told Digiday that YouTube’s scalable creator ad products, such as BrandConnect, were more complex and less seamless than other platforms’ options, and that YouTube hasn’t done enough to educate them on how to use them effectively. Marketers want to reach YouTube audiences at scale, yet none of the three who spoke to Digiday felt confident using BrandConnect or other internal YouTube tools to do it.
“I would like to see YouTube have a bit more of a streamlined process, because I am a huge advocate for influencer partnerships on YouTube,” said Lily Comba, CEO of the influencer marketing agency Superbloom. “A lot of brands are like ‘Meta, Meta, Meta’ — it’s what they understand, it’s what’s working — and YouTube is incredibly bewildering to media buyers, and can be very expensive. I would love to see the same things applied to YouTube to make YouTube advertising, particularly in the creator space, a lot easier.”
YouTube views the slow rollout of its scalable creator ad tools as a feature, not a bug. As a platform that already cranks out billions in ad revenue every month, YouTube is in a position to grow its creator ad products slowly and steadily, rather than rushing them to market. The company is taking a measured approach to ensure that it doesn’t hurt its creator community by prioritizing advertisers’ needs over creators’, YouTube Ads director of product management Melissa Hsieh Nikolic told Digiday.
After all, while scalable creator ads offer efficiency and reach, they risk also diluting the authenticity that makes creator content resonate in the first place. Scalable creator ads function similarly to programmatic advertising in that they allow brands to amplify creator content automatically and at scale, turning creator work into just another piece of inventory in an automated auction.
“We are and have been focused on pushing features that are really around creator discovery. Exposure to creators that [brands] can hire is the most important thing we’re focused on right now,” Hsieh Nikolic said. “We still give advertisers and creators the mechanisms — if they want to do their standard deals one-on-one, that’s fine, and if they want to do it on our systems that support it, that’s also fine.”
Hsieh Nikolic acknowledged that YouTube’s scalable creator ad tools are still in their “earlier days,” but said the platform is working hard to address any shortcomings, with more tools slated to become “globally available next year.”
“We’re also very focused on making sure that advertisers have transparency in reporting, because we think that’s where we could bring a lot of value to the market,” she said.
YouTube’s measured approach notwithstanding, both creators and advertisers are enthusiastic about the expansion of scalable creator ads on the platform, seeing it as a rising tide for all stakeholders in the creator ecosystem. Creator Ryan Benjelloun told Digiday that he welcomed the rise of partnership ads and other scalable creator ad tools across platforms because they would encourage brands to step up their spending across all forms of creator marketing.
“This new system keeps both parties happy,” he said. “Creators are no longer just partners in a deal — they are strategic media channels, and as this grows, the role of the influencer in the success of these businesses will also grow.”
Wallet brand Ridge plans to spend over half of its marketing budget on Meta partnership ads this year, according to CMO Connor MacDonald, who estimated that the format’s returns are roughly 20 percent better than the company’s “business as usual” marketing tactics, such as traditional digital ads.
“TikTok is the closest, in terms of having all of these tools available — but it’s just inevitable that YouTube builds out these tools, and Snapchat builds out these tools, between some combination of native tooling and partnering with people like Superfiliate or Refunnel to build them out,” MacDonald said.
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