I had the opportunity to join Pixability and Google in Boston to speak on a panel about the evolving role of YouTube in today’s media landscape. I was especially excited to participate alongside our client partner, Susie Siegel, Director of Integrated Marketing at Gorton’s Seafood, bringing both the agency and brand perspectives to the discussion.
The panel explored how marketers are navigating YouTube’s growing role across the media mix – from CTV and Shorts to in-stream video, creative and measurement. The conversation reinforced how YouTube is evolving within an increasingly fragmented media landscape and why marketers need to think more holistically about the role it can play across the consumer journey.
For years, YouTube has often been viewed as an upper-funnel, video-first channel – a powerful way to build awareness and reach audiences at scale. But as CTV, social video, retail media, and commerce continue to converge, that role is becoming much more nuanced.
Here are three themes I took away from the conversation.
YouTube is becoming both a brand and performance channel
Historically, YouTube has been thought of primarily as an upper-funnel investment, and it remains an important channel for building awareness, reaching new audiences, and creating demand. However, we’re now seeing more opportunities for YouTube to play a role further down the funnel as well.
The continued growth of retail media is creating new opportunities to connect upper- and lower-funnel marketing. As retailers expand their partnerships with major media platforms, marketers can increasingly combine YouTube’s scale and storytelling capabilities with their first-party data and closed-loop measurement.
These partnerships are creating new opportunities to evolve how we target, measure, and activate YouTube – going beyond simply driving reach to better connect media exposure to the right consumers, environments, and, ultimately, business outcomes.
That doesn’t mean every YouTube dollar should suddenly be evaluated like a lower-funnel investment. Brand building still matters. But the lines between awareness, consideration, and conversion are becoming increasingly blurred. And that’s a good thing.
Format shouldn’t dictate strategy
Another topic we discussed was how we think about budgeting across YouTube formats – CTV, in-stream, and Shorts. Our approach is to think about YouTube as a unified investment, rather than putting each format into a separate budget bucket.
Part of the reason is that the way consumers use YouTube is changing. TV screens have now become YouTube’s most-watched screen, and consumers aren’t just watching long-form content on their TVs – they’re watching in-stream video and Shorts there, too.
That challenges traditional ways of thinking about video planning. We can no longer assume CTV means long-form content on a television, while Shorts means vertical video on a mobile device. The same formats can show up across screens and throughout different moments of the consumer journey.
That’s why we prefer to manage YouTube as a single investment rather than pulling from separate buckets – for example, treating CTV as a TV expense and Shorts as a social expense. Separating formats creates artificial constraints around where dollars can go, when in reality these formats can work together toward the same business objective.
Keeping the investment unified allows us to shift dollars based on where we’re seeing the strongest opportunity, rather than being limited by how a format has traditionally been categorized.
Media and creative need to be in the room together earlier
Perhaps the biggest opportunity – and one that extends well beyond YouTube – is bringing media and creative teams together earlier in the process.
The way consumers experience content is changing rapidly, and creative needs to be built with those environments in mind from the start. If a campaign will run across CTV, in-stream, Shorts and social, those environments should be part of the creative conversation early on.
That means asking questions like:
- How will the idea translate to vertical?
- Do we have a Shorts-friendly version?
- Can the creative work both with sound and without?
- How does the story change when someone is watching on a TV versus scrolling on their phone?
The goal isn’t to create completely different campaigns for every platform. It’s about developing a flexible creative system that allows a strong idea to work across the environments where consumers are actually spending their time.
The common thread across all three conversations is that the media landscape is becoming less about individual channels and more about how those channels work together – and YouTube is a great example of that evolution.
Instead of asking, “Is YouTube a brand channel or a performance channel?” we should be asking: What role can YouTube play across the consumer journey, and how can we build the right combination of audience, format, creative and measurement to make it work?
The answer will look different for every brand. But one thing is clear: YouTube’s role in the media mix is becoming much bigger than simply delivering video views. And I’m excited to see where it goes next.
