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.”

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