Creators May Have a Second Job. And So Might Media Planners.

Back in mid-June, I interviewed Elad Schor, head of business commerce, Google, during a YouTube Day event hosted by Cadent at Google HQ in New York, during which he kind of joked (and kind of wasn’t kidding) that Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Perplexity are running out of content to read.

“The LLMs are hungry,” said Schor. “They are running out of text.” Increasingly, Schor noted, these LLMs are turning to YouTube, and specifically creator-generated content for information.

Schor noted that today YouTube gets 3.5 times more traffic and referrals from AI chatbots than Facebook and Wikipedia combined.

“YouTube is officially the baseline for the next generation of search,” he said.

I bring this up because increasingly I’m hearing just how important creators - particularly niche or micro-influencers - are becoming for what gets cited by AI search engines - and how brands show up. Will Heins, partner at Jellyfish, echoed this sentiment at this same YouTube event.

And at an off site this past week, I spent a lot of time with a group of brands and buyers - for whom influencing LLMs is top of mind - and maybe part of their jobs.

“LLMs are a new audience marketers have to optimize for,” noted Natalie Silverstein, Chief Innovation Officer, Collectively, on this week’s episode of Next in Media, which we shot in Cannes a few weeks back as part of my ongoing series on the YouTube Ecosystem with my partners at Cadent VuePlanner. “I think you need to think about the LLM as a new audience.”

This brings up so many interesting questions:

• Can brands and their media buying agencies be expected to thinking about which creators to work both for their abilities to connect with human audiences, as well as their ability to influence machines?

• Can you do both effectively?

• Can you measure that?

• Should this be the media department’s job? The PR or marketing teams? Somewhere else?

• Will this lead to more brands working with niche or ‘expert’ creators versus creators who are pure entertainers?

“What the LLMs like,” said Silverstein, “is structure. You ask a question, your content answers that question directly...It’s kind of not for people. It’s kind of for the model more than anything.”

That could be great, or it could lead to a sea of sameness, or misaligned goals. I don’t know that the industry totally has this strategy figured out yet, but “it’s increasingly a consideration,” said Heins.

Thankfully, for now, “there's a lot of human judgment that still goes into creator marketing,” said Silverstein.

Check out the full interview here: