With TikTok facing increasing scrutiny and changes, many marketers are reassessing how they invest in platforms. While short-form remains relevant, YouTube is emerging as the go-to space for longevity, storytelling, and community-led brand impact.
This week, we brought together brands, creators, and platform experts for an exclusive breakfast event exploring why YouTube should be central to any Influencer Marketing strategy in 2025 and how it can perfectly complement your activity on other platforms.
Here are the top insights and takeaways from the event that brands need to know:
YouTube is no longer just an online video platform, it’s become an essential part of cross-device entertainment. According to Google’s Creative Business Lead, Nisha Mathews, 40% of YouTube Shorts viewers aren’t on TikTok, and she sees patterns of users coming to Shorts with specific content in mind and to be educated and entertained in a specific niche. Nisha shared that Shorts are highly popular on Connected TV (CTV) too, and in fact, YouTube steals the crown for the most popular TV streaming service in the US.
Source: Neilsen
According to Rachel Morgan-Jones, IMC Media Manager UK & Nordics, Colgate-Palmolive, the brand is seeing close to double the ROI from Creator Paid Ads on YouTube vs. branded assets in paid placements. That’s in part because YouTube’s audience recognizes and becomes invested in creators' personalities, so seeing an ad featuring their favorite creators' faces feels like an extension of their organic content. allowing for deeper engagement. As Jack Edwards, a decade-long YouTuber creator, noted, with YouTube, creators' content long-form lives in their viewers' subscription boxes, rather than in an algorithm-driven feed, your content lives in subscribers’ feeds, making consistency and narrative in subsequent paid content matter.
The shift toward Connected TV means brands must think about the viewing context. YouTube isn’t just mobile-first anymore. Ads should be built for the big screen, using Google’s ABCD framework (Attract, Brand, Connect, Direct) to guide creative. A strong call-to-action remains crucial to tell viewers where you want them to go, especially with the knowledge that many consumers are watching YouTube on a television with their phone in hand, ready to action your CTA. Scanable QR codes are great in this instance.
For Carwow, long-form creator collaborations are akin to mini-documentaries – entertaining, informative, and high-performing. Alex Carmichael, Global Creative Lead at Carwow, said that one of the things that matters most for Carwow is finding the right creators and giving them space to build trust with their audience. His advice was simple: don’t force a message into a format that doesn’t fit. Instead, let the creator guide the narrative in a way their audience already loves. This is essential for content to perform well and for audiences to shape a positive perception of your brand.
The Community Tab is one of YouTube’s most overlooked assets. Jack Edwards actively uses it to engage his community. For example, Jack was invited to host The Hunger Games midnight premiere in London, he shared this with his subscribers in the Community Tab, and the event organizers reported a large increase in event ticket sales attributed to that specific post. Nisha added that sport, entertainment, and niche fandoms thrive in the community tab, too.
Jack suggested that if you’re launching a campaign or an event, consider allocating budget specifically toward Community Tab promotion as it’s where the most dedicated creator superfans hang out, and where meaningful conversations happen.
68% of YouTube users watched content on the platform to help make a purchase decision, but effective Influencer Marketing on YouTube requires understanding where your content sits in the funnel. That might mean different formats and scripts for awareness vs. conversion.
Lauren Warnock from brand uplift study platform ThisThat emphasized the importance of clarity: set KPIs from the outset and build content tailored to them. Test-and-learn approaches have worked wonders. One particular brand that ThisThat worked with on test-and-learn uplift surveys saw 65% of its growth from a YouTube integration using optimized campaigns, having identified the perfect creator vertical and content style to convert.
Our Head of Paid and Partnerships, Chandni Fokeer, shared some brilliant examples of YouTube conversion campaigns that influencers have run. For example, last year, we worked with a New Zealand-based beauty brand named Trilogy, which wanted to grow in the US market.
To break into the saturated US beauty space, we created a full-funnel solution with influencers at the heart. Each authentic piece of creator content drove traffic to Trilogy’s website or Amazon, generating sales or valuable data for retargeting and future strategies.
Brands need to share Google Analytics, Amazon, and Shopify data for agencies like us to effectively track and improve performance. Another way we were able to see the detailed impact of our campaign was by generating personalized discount codes and UTM links.
Creators generated 60% of the total campaign revenue on Trilogy’s website and drove 90% of both traffic and revenue to Amazon during Amazon Prime Day. We leaned deeper into understanding the consumer journey and found that purchase intent from our influencer traffic was 3 times higher than Trilogy’s website's average.
Trust and consistency beat virality. According to Jordan Theresa, a video essay creator with a personality-driven channel, long-term brand partnerships work best because her audience knows when a product genuinely fits her lifestyle. Her content is often based on audience requests, making it even more critical that brand integrations feel aligned.
When brands try to over-control messaging, it backfires. Instead, Jordan implores brands to listen to creators, creating clear yet flexible briefs, and understanding that sometimes audiences prefer transparency over forced integration. It’s 2025, and it's no secret to audiences that they’re being advertised to.
Of course, AI got a mention during the panel sessions. The consensus was clear that AI is, and should be, a tool to enhance creativity, not replace it. YouTube has incorporated AI tools into the platform to make creators’ and audiences’ experiences more seamless, but at the heart of everything is still the creator.
As Bolly Nolla, Creative Lead at Google, shared, creators aren’t just content producers; they’re community builders, and brands must treat them as creative partners, not just media channels.
Ultimately, Influencer Marketing on YouTube in 2025 is about more than reach, it’s about resonance. Brands that trust creators, lean into community, and invest in long-form storytelling will see lasting ROI.
If you want to learn about how you can develop a YouTube strategy that will drive results, reach out to us at hello@digitalvoices.com.
