Why YouTube and Adam W say trust is the #1 creator marketing KPI right now

TL;DR

• The creator economy is a fragile ecosystem, and the brands that treat it that way tend to build partnerships that actually last.

• Deciding whether a campaign brings the creator into your world or sends you into theirs shapes everything about how the partnership should be structured.

• YouTube's own research shows that 78% of viewers trust creators most for product recommendations, which is also a big part of why creators are showing up first when people search through AI.

We're taking Made You Look on the road, and our first stop in L.A. set the blueprint. 

The first stop of The Made You Look Tour, an invite-only series of live sessions built for senior marketing leaders, with just 25 seats in the room and no recording after the fact, landed at Soho House in downtown Los Angeles. Our CEO Scott Sutton moderated a conversation with Adam W, a creator with 21M+ followers and over a decade of experience building audiences across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and Andrew Peterson, Head of Creator Economy Ecosystem at YouTube. Together, they got into what actually makes a creator partnership work, how to think about views and community differently, and what AI search means for brands trying to earn attention.

Here are some of the top takeaways from their conversation.

Treat the creator economy like the fragile ecosystem it is

Scott opened the session by naming the tension underneath the whole industry. Everyone wants to claim they're the biggest, the first, or the best, but the creator economy is still a young and interconnected system that a lot of parties are trying to build on at once. He said the goal behind the tour series is to get those parties, marketers, brands, and creators into the same room before that system gets pulled in too many directions.

"This is really a community. It's an ecosystem, and it's actually kind of fragile," Scott said. He added that livelihoods are being built on all sides of it, from creators to brands to platforms, which is exactly why he wanted a forum where those groups could help shape what the creator economy becomes rather than just extract value from it.

Anchor your platform strategy in value, not format

When Scott asked Andrew how YouTube has stayed relevant through so many shifts in the industry, his answer came down to a single question the platform keeps asking itself: are we still the most valuable place for viewers, creators, and advertisers? That's the lens YouTube used to justify launching a subscription tier, expanding into podcasts, and building Shorts into a platform that now sees 200 billion views a day.

"If you anchor on value, it doesn't matter what we were ten years ago, five years ago, today, in five years' time," Andrew explained. He noted that having that as a north star is what let YouTube diversify into connected TV, on-demand video, and short form without ever feeling like it was chasing a trend. The takeaway for brands is the same: pick the value you're providing an audience first, and let the format follow from there instead of the other way around.

Recalibrate what a "good" view count actually means

One of the more grounding moments in the session was Andrew pointing out how badly marketers misjudge scale. A first-time creator will look at 180 views and call it a flop, without stopping to think about what room they've ever stood in with 180 people where that felt small.

"What room have you been in with 180 people where you were like, that's a small and insignificant amount of people?" Andrew asked. He pushed the point further with Adam's own numbers, noting that a video with 20 million views represents roughly the population of Oregon. For brands evaluating creator partnerships, that reframe matters: a view is a person, and the scale creators reach is almost always bigger than it first appears.

Know the difference between followers and a community

Adam drew a clear line between the audiences he's built on different platforms. Instagram and TikTok, in his experience, tend to produce followers who are passively scrolling. YouTube, on the other hand, produces something closer to a community, viewers who notice small details in the background of a video and show up because they're truly invested in who he is.

"There's a difference between getting a million views of just passive people following, kind of just going and seeing, versus a million people who are actually into who you are," Adam said. He noted that this distinction directly affects brand performance too, since a community that's invested in a creator is far more likely to click and convert when that creator promotes a product.

Master quality and quantity together

Adam was direct about what it actually takes to grow a creator audience at scale: it isn't one lever, it's two. Consistency matters as much as craft, and creators who only optimize for one tend to plateau.

"It's quality and quantity, being able to put out a consistent amount of content, but also making that content valuable," he said. For brands building out always-on creator programs, the same logic applies. A single polished campaign moment won't build the kind of trust that regular, valuable content does over time.

Compare creator content to creator content, not display ads

Scott pushed back on a habit he sees constantly in influencer marketing measurement: treating a creator view like it's equivalent to a display ad impression just because both can be reduced to a CPM. He argued that flattening those two experiences into the same math misses what makes creator content valuable in the first place.

"A view is not just this annoyed consumer with a blocked experience. It is someone who's a fan, who's discovering something interesting from someone they genuinely enjoy, while being entertained," Scott said. His point for marketers building mixed-media models: a creator view and a banner ad view are not the same unit of value, and treating them that way undersells the entire category.

Backdoor the brand into the joke, not the pitch

When Scott asked Adam how he approaches brand partnerships, Adam described a specific creative method rather than a general philosophy. He looks for the most relatable tension around a product first, builds the story or the joke around that tension, and only then lets the brand step in as the resolution.

"If I'm working with Old Spice, what's the most relatable thing about deodorant? When people smell, when people sweat. I lead with that idea, and then I'll backdoor Old Spice in to be the hero," Adam explained. He said a video built this way did 255 million views on YouTube with no paid boosting at all, compared to campaigns where the brand leads and the video ends up performing like an ad that audiences skip past.

Decide whether you're bringing the creator into your world or entering theirs

Andrew framed one of the most useful strategic questions of the session as a binary choice brands need to make consciously, not by accident. Every partnership either pulls the creator into the brand's existing world, or it sends the brand into the creator's world instead. Neither is inherently better, but the execution looks completely different depending on which one you're doing.

"In a campaign, are you trying to bring the creator into your world, or are you trying to go into the creator's world?" Andrew asked. He pointed to Adam's Old Spice video as an example of the latter, noting that going into a creator's world can produce real results, along with a level of discomfort for brand teams who are used to controlling the message.

Let creators tell you the truth about your brand

Scott built on that idea by naming something most brand marketers don't want to hear directly: they don't actually control how their brand is perceived. Creators, because they sit closer to the audience, often have a clearer read on that perception than the brand itself does.

"You think you own your brand, but the consumer actually owns the perception of your brand," Scott said, pointing to New Balance's transformation from an uncool legacy brand to a genuinely desirable one as an example of what happens when a brand listens to that outside perspective instead of fighting it. Releasing creative control, in his framing, is less a risk and more a way to find out what your audience actually thinks before you try to change it.

Optimize for audience value, and LLM visibility follows

The conversation turned to a question a lot of marketers are currently wrestling with: how to structure their content so it will be favored by AI search. Andrew's answer reframed the question entirely. Instead of trying to reverse-engineer an algorithm, he suggested replacing the word "algorithm" with "audience," since YouTube's recommendation systems are built to connect viewers with the most valuable content for them, not to reward any particular trick.

"Our system is just designed to drive the most value to an audience," Andrew said, tying that directly to a stat he shared earlier in the conversation: 78% of viewers say YouTube creators are the most trusted source for product recommendations. Since LLMs are also optimizing to serve the most reliable answer to a query, that trust is a big part of why creator content is already showing up prominently in AI search results, and it's a reason for brands to invest in authentic third-party creator voices rather than paid placements that read like ads.

Meet your audience everywhere they already are

Andrew closed his portion of the conversation with a point about content strategy that goes beyond any single platform decision. He described his own day as a viewer moving between formats constantly, Shorts on the commute, a podcast on the way home, a long-form documentary on the living room screen, and argued that brands need to think about audience and story first, then work out how to tell that story in whatever format fits each moment.

"When you can put the audience and the story at the center of what you do, you start figuring out how do I tell this story everywhere, in every way that people might want to consume it," Andrew said. Scott added that this is part of why creators have expanded well beyond the social feed, showing up in boardrooms, on corporate websites, and increasingly as part of a brand's annual planning process rather than a single campaign line item.

The room was small, but the takeaways weren't

If there's one thread running through this conversation, it's that trust is the actual currency of the creator economy, whether that trust shows up in a fan's relationship with a creator, a brand's willingness to hand over some creative control, or an LLM deciding which source to cite. The Made You Look Tour exists to get senior marketers into a room to talk through ideas like these before they show up in a trend report months later.

This was the first stop on the tour, with more cities to come, and the guest list for each one is being built as intentionally as the conversation itself. There's no public registration and no recording afterward. The only way in is an invitation. Be on the lookout for our next stop and request your invite if you want a seat at the table.

If you're thinking through how to structure creator partnerships that actually earn trust instead of looking like ads, schedule a strategy session with our team.