YouTube Creator Partnerships: How to Use the Latest Brand Tools

YouTube Creator Partnerships is a suite of tools connecting brands with creators. This Gemini-powered platform helps advertisers discover relevant creators who can turn existing content into YouTube ads, streamlining the entire collaboration process.

What if there were a way to connect with creators whose audiences perfectly align with your target audience?

Or better yet, discover organic YouTube videos that already feature your brand or products — and turn that content into high-performing video ads?

YouTube Creator Partnerships, formerly BrandConnect, is doing exactly that.

Google’s new AI-powered creator discovery and collaboration platform plays matchmaker for creators and brands inside their respective platforms: Google Ads and YouTube Studio.

Now, brands can easily find relevant creators’ channels for highly targeted campaign collaborations.

We spoke with HawkSEM Digital Marketing Director Jessica Weber to understand how this new integrated feature works and what it means for advertisers going forward.

What is YouTube Creator Partnerships?

YouTube Creator Partnerships is a feature inside YouTube Studio for creators and Google Ads & Display and Video 360 for advertisers.

This integrated tool connects advertisers (brands) with creators who have a hyper-relevant audience and share videos that mention the brand or its products.

How does YouTube Creator Partnerships work?

YouTube Creator Partnerships uses Gemini AI to automatically recommend the best creator matches for a brand’s campaign, facilitate outreach and management, and then measure results.

Here are the key functions of the platform:

1. Brands enter their campaign goals

Advertisers provide the platform with information about their brand, target audience, campaign objectives, and desired creator characteristics.

2. Creators set their rate

Inside YouTube Studio, the dashboard for YouTube content creators, creators can set their starting rate for interested brands to see. Rates typically range from $10 to $30 per 1,000 views (CPM); however, some niche categories like tech or finance may be as high as $100 per 1,000 views.

3. Gemini analyzes billions of data points to suggest creators

YouTube uses Gemini’s AI to analyze and select highly relevant creators to a brand. To create this list, Gemini considers:

• Audience similarity and demographics
• Organic brand or product mentions
• Subscriber growth

4. Outreach happens inside the platform

After creators are suggested, the outreach process is made simple.

Advertisers can build a list of the creators who best match their campaign and identity. Then, they can contact them directly through Creator Partnerships.

YouTube is also rolling out the ability to send bulk inquiries to multiple creators, streamlining the outreach process further.

5. The creator and brand negotiate terms

From here, the creator and brand negotiate deliverables, usage rights, deadlines, and compensation.

YouTube includes a dedicated section to manage brand deal links to facilitate a clearer and more organized collaboration process.

Once the creator publishes the sponsored content, the brand pays the creator directly.

6. Monitor and optimize content

YouTube measures both organic creator content and paid promotion. Brands can analyze performance through metrics including:

• Brand Lift
• Search Lift
• Conversion Lift
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Advertisers can also test creator content like other ad creative to optimize based on performance.

7. Brands can turn existing creator content into ad campaigns

With YouTube Creator Partnerships, organic creator content can be transformed into paid advertising.

If a creator has already published a video featuring or mentioning a brand, advertisers can use Creator Partnerships Boost (formerly Partnership Ads) to promote that content across YouTube.

Rather than creating new ad creative from scratch, brands can amplify authentic creator videos that are already resonating with audiences.

These creator-led ads can run across YouTube’s advertising products, including Demand Gen, Video Reach, and Video View campaigns, and these ad formats can include YouTube Shorts or long-form video content.

Bonus: Brands can publish briefs and receive creator submissions

In addition to brand-to-creator outreach, creators can also submit content ideas or videos to brands for potential promotional use.

This creates an additional discovery channel, giving advertisers access to creators who may be a strong fit but weren’t initially identified through search or recommendations.

How Creator Partnerships differ from traditional influencer platforms

Traditional influencer sponsorships live outside the ad platform: A brand negotiates a deal, the creator posts, and everyone hopes the algorithm cooperates.

Creator Partnership Ads close that gap by letting brands boost a creator’s actual video, run it directly from the creator’s channel, and manage the whole relationship inside Google Ads.

“You get the creator’s voice and audience trust plus the targeting, budget control, and measurement of a paid campaign, without recreating the content from scratch,” Weber explains.

What types of brands or campaign goals would perform best with this format?

YouTube Creator Partnerships reward brands that already have a product or service a creator can talk about honestly — not ones trying to force a fit.

“It works across the funnel,” says Weber. “But the strongest gains show up in Demand Gen and Video View campaigns on Shorts, where ads pulled from a creator’s own channel are converting better than standard branded ads.”

Consumer brands with a real presence on Shorts, and any advertiser chasing awareness and lower-funnel conversion in the same campaign, are getting the most out of it.

Why YouTube Creator Partnerships are important

The integration of the YouTube Creator Partnerships with Google Ads’ platforms marks a massive shift in the creator-advertiser relationship.

Historically, brand-creator partnerships have been an arduous process for both parties.

Creators spent hours putting together media packages, pitching brands, and sending outreach emails in hopes of landing the right partnership — often without a response, even if their audiences aligned with the brand’s target market.

Brands faced a different challenge. Marketing teams had to sift through countless YouTube channels, social media profiles, and influencer databases to identify potential partners.

YouTube Creator Partnerships completely streamlines and simplifies this process through the following tactics.

Less cold outreach by creators

The Creator Partnerships tool auto-populates within the UI and surfaces channels that have already produced videos referencing the brand, which makes them a much warmer starting point for outreach than cold prospecting.

Closes the gap between paid advertising and creator content

When it comes to digital marketing strategies, many brands manage paid advertising and creator content separately.

But this siloed approach has limited the impact of both.

If creator content generated strong engagement, why not amplify that content through paid promotion?

YouTube Creator Partnerships addresses this gap by easily merging the two.

More streamlined path to partnerships

If a creator is already talking about the brand organically, the lift to a paid partnership is much shorter.

By bringing creator discovery and outreach directly into Google’s advertising ecosystem, YouTube reduces the need for separate creator databases, influencer marketplaces, and lengthy manual research processes.

Organic creator content becomes the ad campaign

With Creator Partnerships Boost, brands can turn creator content into paid advertising directly within YouTube campaigns.

Instead of creating separate ad creative, marketers can amplify authentic creator videos that are already performing well with their audiences.

The result is a more integrated approach where creator content and paid media work together rather than competing for budget and attention.

Eligibility requirements

Interested in finding your new favorite creators through the Creator Partnership? Here’s what we know so far about eligibility requirements:

For advertisers

Advertisers can access Creator Partnerships through Google Ads and Display & Video 360.

For creators

Creators must be part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) to be included in the Creator Partnerships ecosystem.

Creators can improve their visibility by voluntarily sharing their channel insights with brands. According to YouTube, creators who shared channel insights were surfaced 60% more often in search results.

YouTube Partner Program requirements

For creators to join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), they need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in the past 12 months, or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views in the past 90 days.

Which metrics matter most when evaluating Creator Partnership Ad success?

Brand Lift, Search Lift, and Conversion Lift studies are the most important metrics to evaluate Creator Partnership Ad success, according to Weber:

“They show whether the partnership actually moved awareness and purchase intent instead of just racking up cheap impressions and clicks,” she says.

“We also pay close attention to the organic audience data a linked video brings in. That audience becomes one of the highest-intent segments a brand can target in future campaigns.”

The bottom line

“Creator Partnership Ads is Google’s answer to a problem every brand already had: influencer marketing and paid media lived in two separate systems with two separate reporting dashboards,” says Weber.

“Bringing them into one platform, with AI matching that can sort through millions of creators for audience and content fit, is why this is worth testing now instead of waiting for it to mature.”

YouTube’s own measurement already points to meaningfully higher incremental ROAS than paid social when creator content runs this way.

Weber’s word of advice? Don’t overproduce.

“The biggest mistake we see is creating creator content like a script that needs line-by-line approval,” says Weber. “Once a brand overproduces the video, it stops looking like a genuine recommendation, and performance drops with it.”

If you need some help getting started, look no further.

HawkSEM’s team of digital marketing experts stays on top of Google’s and YouTube’s latest advertising features, helping brands turn new opportunities into measurable results.

Reach out today.