TL;DR
• YouTube’s value to brands goes well beyond audience size. The combination of long-form depth, short-form discovery, and content that compounds in value over time makes it the most complete full-funnel platform available to creators and brands right now.
• Creator spend is growing four times faster than total media industry spend. Brands treating YouTube as a broadcast channel are misreading the opportunity.
• AI is changing how consumers discover and validate purchases, and YouTube content is one of the primary sources those AI models draw from. Brands that invest in creator content on YouTube are building an asset that extends well beyond the platform itself.
At Cannes Lions this year, the Later Lounge hosted a series of sessions covering some of the most pressing questions in creator marketing. One of those conversations zeroed in on a platform that’s been central to the creator economy since the beginning and is now becoming something more — YouTube. It has quietly matured into a full-funnel performance channel with compounding returns.
Lyle Stevens, Later’s co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, moderated a session with Mithun Sheth, VP of strategy and operations at YouTube; Stacy Carpenter, SVP of global social media at SharkNinja; and Adam W, one of YouTube’s most prolific creators.
The discussion covered why YouTube has earned a different kind of attention from brand marketers, what great creator partnerships actually look like on the platform, and how AI is reshaping the entire content discovery landscape in ways brands can’t afford to ignore.
Keep reading for the takeaways.
YouTube is a full-funnel platform, and the data makes the case
The conversation opened with a question that’s easy to take for granted. With so many creator platforms competing for brand budgets, why YouTube specifically?
Mithun’s answer cut straight to the point. Reach, he noted, is something many platforms have. What YouTube offers that others don’t is the combination of user intent, format diversity, and the trust that builds between creators and their communities over time. “76% of viewers experience things they never thought they would because of YouTube,” he said. That discovery dynamic, combined with the depth of the creator-audience relationship, is what translates into measurable purchase behavior.
Lyle offered a statistic that reframes how brand marketers should be thinking about their overall media mix: creator ad spend is currently growing four times faster than total media industry spend. This reflects a structural shift in where consumer attention lives and where proven ROI is showing up.
Stacy put the platform’s utility in concrete terms for SharkNinja. The brand is well known for viral moments on short-form platforms, but not every product can be understood in six seconds, and some demand more context than that.
“We don’t all want to wait or read a manual. YouTube is a really great vehicle for us to test and teach people in a way that’s educational and also fun,” she said. For a brand selling complex, high-consideration products like the Ninja CREAMi, long-form creator content on YouTube does work that short-form simply can’t.
Adam added a creator’s perspective on why the platform’s format flexibility is so valuable. Long-form content, he argued, doesn’t really work anywhere else. The path he described, using Shorts as a discovery and growth engine and converting that audience to longer viewing over time, is one that maps naturally to a brand’s full-funnel objectives.
“Because YouTube was built for long-form video, it makes it very easy to use Shorts as a growth engine and then transition all of those subscribers to watch for longer and longer,” he said.
Mithun added one more number worth internalizing: 45% of YouTube Shorts users are not on TikTok, and 65% are not on Instagram Reels.
For brands focused on reach and audience expansion, that’s a significant pool of people who can only be accessed through YouTube.
The best creative partnerships lead with storytelling
The panel spent meaningful time on what separates creator content that performs from content that doesn’t, and the answer had little to do with production value or platform mechanics.
Adam’s approach is built around finding the human tension in a product story. A relatable problem, dramatized well, with the brand as the resolution. He described a campaign with a major automotive brand where the creative concept was built entirely around complaints people have about cars, with the brand positioned as the answer. The result was comments from viewers saying the brand should have paid him, unaware that it already had.
“That is actually the largest compliment,” he said. When the audience can’t tell it’s an ad because the storytelling is so strong, the partnership is working.
Stacy described a different but complementary model with SharkNinja Originals, an in-house production approach where her team co-creates entertainment-style content with creators, featuring them as talent rather than spokespeople. The content is built for long-form YouTube, with language and hooks designed to travel globally. Different creators bring the concept to different markets, but the IP stays consistent. It’s a model that treats YouTube less like a media placement and more like an owned content channel with creator talent at the center.
Mithun reinforced this from a platform perspective, noting that 70% of YouTube creators operate across both Shorts and long-form. For brands, the implication is that the most effective creator partnerships are built around a creator whose storytelling works at multiple lengths and serves different stages of the funnel simultaneously.
Lyle’s synthesis of this point landed well with the room: “That’s how you come across so authentic. You’re pulling on a human tension,” he said, speaking directly to Adam’s approach.
When a brand’s product solves a real, recognizable problem and a creator frames it that way, the audience responds differently than it does to a traditional ad.
YouTube content compounds, but most brands aren’t accounting for that
One of the most practically useful threads in the conversation was about the long-term return on YouTube content, and it’s one that most brands aren’t fully factoring into how they measure creator investment.
Mithun shared a striking platform statistic. 30% of clicks and 40% of views on YouTube happen more than 30 days after a video is published. The shelf life of well-made YouTube content is fundamentally different from what brands are used to on other platforms, where content typically peaks within 24 to 48 hours and then disappears.
On YouTube, a video can keep generating views, discovery, and purchase intent for months or years after publication. “The shelf life of what you put on YouTube is really long, and that translates into dividends over and over again,” Mithun said. “It’s an annuity for the future.”
Adam made this concrete with a personal example. A video he posted initially received around five million views. When he checked it roughly a year later, the count had reached 650 million. “I just stopped checking it, because it was such an old video, and it just kept growing,” he said.
A new YouTube capability Mithun discussed makes this even more interesting for brands. Dynamic brand segments allow creators to open up a brand placement slot after publication, rather than only at the time of posting. For videos that are already performing well, brands can actively seek out high-performing content to place against.
It means a brand can benefit from creator content that has already proven itself, rather than betting on a video before it goes live.
AI is changing discovery, and YouTube content is what gets cited
The final section of the conversation was the one with the most forward-looking implications, and it connects the YouTube opportunity to something larger.
Lyle opened this thread with an observation from Later's work with clients. When consumers discover something on YouTube, many go straight to an AI assistant to research further. According to Later's research on creator AEO and AI search infrastructure, between 90-95% of what gets cited in those AI-generated answers is creator content, community discussions, and third-party sources rather than brand-owned content.
Stacy described SharkNinja's approach to this directly. The brand has deliberately built a creator ecosystem that covers all three layers of the funnel: entertainment content at the top, educational content in the middle, and affiliate-style content at the bottom focused on price and value. "In an ideal scenario, when we cast our creator ecosystem, you've got the messaging across the top, the middle, and the bottom," she said. The goal is to ensure that wherever an AI model or a search engine goes looking for information about a SharkNinja product, it finds verifiable, specific, creator-driven content.
Adam walked through how YouTube's own AI tools are helping creators produce more of exactly that kind of content. The Inspiration tab surfaces what subscribers are already watching. Dream Screen generates visual effects at a fraction of traditional production costs. The Omni feature lets fans insert themselves into videos, extending reach through remixing. Each tool lowers the barrier to producing the deep, specific, verifiable content that AI models are most likely to surface.
Lyle's closing observation is the one that should shape how brands think about their YouTube investment going forward. Creator content on YouTube is building a layer of third-party validation that AI models draw on long after a video is published. The brands that understand this have stopped thinking about their YouTube creator investment as a media buy and are now treating it as infrastructure.
The bigger picture on YouTube
The combination of format flexibility, content longevity, audience trust, and emerging AI integration makes YouTube the most strategically complete option in a brand’s creator mix.
The brands building real programs there are the ones thinking in years rather than campaigns, investing in creator relationships that deepen over time, building content that compounds in value, and positioning their creator ecosystem as a source of verifiable proof that AI models can draw on.
The window to build that kind of durable presence, before every brand catches on, is closing.
This session was part of Later's broader Cannes Lions 2026 programming. For more takeaways from the Later Lounge, read our recaps of the TikTok panel with Southwest Airlines and Connor Wood, and Scott Sutton’s fireside chat with Snap and David Dobrik.
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