If there were three takeaways from YouTube’s 2026 NewFronts announcements this year, we’d boil it down to this: creators, creators, and creators. Which is not to be confused with last year’s YouTube NewFronts which were also about…creators.
The Rise of the Creator may sound like a new Star War, but it’s clear that “creator” has entered big-business territory, and something marketers want to tap into. According to IAB’s November 2025 report on the creator economy and ad spend, creator ad spend “is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year over year and nearly 4x faster than the media industry’s overall growth. Over the past three years, creator advertising has more than doubled—from $13.9B in 2021 to $29.5B in 2024—as brands increasingly treat creators not just as social media partners but as a full-fledged channel.” YouTube, of course, is a major creator hub, and this year, the platform is rolling out new tools for brands to connect with creators, complete with new features powered by Google Gemini.
“Creator marketing is at an inflection point. Creators are no longer just competing for attention. They’’re winning it,” Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle, YouTube ads marketing VP, said onstage at YouTube’s NewFronts presentation in New York on Thursday. “Influencer marketing was just a piece of your larger strategy, and now creative partnerships are at the core of your campaigns…Right now we are all trying to understand how to deliver more [and] to find profitable ways to scale.”
A video is worth a thousand words: YouTube connects advertisers with some audiences who don’t use other similar platforms, according to Melissa Hsieh Nikolic, director of product management for YouTube Ads. She cited a 2025 study from data platform GWI that found that 45% of YouTube Shorts users don’t use TikTok and 65% don’t use Instagram Reels.
The platform is rolling out a “one-stop shop for managing collaborations and creator campaigns” within YouTube, a Gemini-infused suite dubbed YouTube Creator Partnerships. The suite, among other things, will consolidate YouTube’s BrandConnect, which showed brands some creators to potentially partner with, and its Creator Partnerships Hub, which displayed creator content that brands could run as their own ads. In the suite, marketers can provide a prompt, such as “Find me US tech creators reviewing sports gear with high Gen Z retention,” and get matched with creators, and Google’s agentic tools will also provide related channel insights and sample videos, Hsieh Nikolic said.
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In other words, users will no longer need to manually search the YouTube Partner Program directory to find partners if they don’t want to, and may even find new partners they had not previously considered. “By partnering outside of their immediate category, a high-end tech brand might discover that their highest ROAS actually comes from hiking creators with highly -engaged audiences,” Hsieh Nikolic said.
In the coming months, brands will also have the ability to put campaign briefs into the system, and Gemini will recommend creators. Users will soon have the ability to contact those creators through the suite and, eventually, “edit and manage all of the brand deal links that are sent to creators as well,” Hsieh Nikolic said. Execs also touted an updated YouTube Creator Partnerships API designed to work with more influencer marketing agencies and SaaS providers.
The suite will also house a creator partnerships boost tool, which will allow brands to use existing creator content as ads across YouTube Shorts and as in-stream ads, Hsieh Nikolic said. The tool has already been used by skin care brand Supergoop in a campaign with creator Liza Koshy across both YouTube Shorts and long-form CTV content, which resulted in a 93% lift for its Glowscreen SPF product.
“Audiences watch and want to watch what they love, every way they want to watch it,” Nelson-Bogle told onlookers. “Strategies that start and end with a TikTok or Meta feed are just on the edge of what’’s possible.”
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