Colin & Samir on the CMO’s Guide to the New Creator Economy

19:07Samir Chaudry:if we do i don't even see it we do get asked this question of from creators early stage creators that are like should i do a a cpa campaign like a cost per acquisition campaign and my belief system from felix gray where we did that for for zero dollars and colin got blue light glasses to the next deal which i think was probably audible or squarespace or one of those early stage conversion brands that was very conversion focused at that time. And I remember feeling like it felt bizarre to me that it was so conversion focused in the first 30 days because like this brand was a part of our creative and a part of our content at that time forever.

19:46Samir Chaudry:We weren't, there was no like, we weren't going to take it out. It was just, you're part of this. And I remember thinking it was very bizarre that we were getting treated like Facebook ads in a way, or like performance marketing, that it was dollars in, dollars out. And I think in podcasting that started to work and so it came to YouTube. But we started to graduate, even for us internally, we just looked at it and said, how do we want this product to show up? What is our ad product? And I think that's the work for creators of when you do, let's say you take one of those free deals early on or you take a CPA deal.

20:15Samir Chaudry:I would never advise to do it. But if you do do it, the only reason to do it is to develop your ad product and then to put that in a deck and go to market and go, now I know what is a good ad product for my audience. This is the ad product I'm comfortable with. And I think having conviction in that for creators is really important. And that's what we started to develop. We were like, you know what? We think there is a good ad product here. As we started to put the podcast on YouTube, there's a presented by slot. There's a natural integration that we'll give you and talk about the brand. There is a CTA link in the description.

20:47Samir Chaudry:And then if your success metric is conversions, then I have to actually be really familiar with where people are landing. So I'm saying all this to recognize the relationship that marketers and creator groups have to have, right? With different goals. I do think we're entering the era where people are recognizing that awareness and consideration can happen through creators because we are the celebrities of today, right? That if we're being watched at millions and millions of views and impressions for long periods of time on a connected TV screen, like we are the stars. So what you used to do with a celebrity, which would never be considered, you know, performance marketing, it was always consideration, awareness, and lift.

21:31Samir Chaudry:You can also do that with creators. And the bottom line, I'll say it over and over, probably more in this podcast, like communicate what success looks like to the creator early. I want to make this practical. List off the four, five, six, seven, whatever it is, like golden rules of you need to tell marketers to work well with you, to work well with creators.

21:50Colin Rosenblum:Yeah. I think it's that first one of like, ask the question, what does success look like? What does success look like? And do you have examples you can send me that were successful in the past?

22:00Samir Chaudry:I would say number two is become a member of the community. Super important because again, as a marketer, you have to be able to empathize with what it's going to be like to receive your message. And if you become the member of the community, you recognize, oh, that's what it feels like to receive a message from a brand in this context, in this show, as a member of this community. Look at what people are talking about, how they're engaging with each other. Like these are real diehard communities because it's interactive media. When you say community, do you mean the Colin and Samir community or do you mean this of the YouTube platform or TikTok platform community?

22:34Samir Chaudry:Well, one of the golden rules is join the Colin and Samir community for sure. But no, whoever you're going to work with, if you're evaluating, you know, Brittany Broski and wanting to sponsor Royal Court, watch royal court.

22:45Colin Rosenblum:Yeah, because if you want to show up at the party and be cool and be accepted, you probably have an idea of who's at the party and what they talk about and what they care about. What else do you think works or helps your best ones?

22:55Samir Chaudry:Develop a repeatable format and have some

22:57Colin Rosenblum:conviction in it. Doing your part to make sure that you're not just interrupting, that you're elevating the experience. I've been actually surprised how few and far between it really is when you work with brands, when it comes to them delivering you visual assets or having a visual world for you to work with. Often creators are sort of rebuilding their own graphics and visual language for a brand within these integrations. And I think there's a lot that brands could do to arm creators with visual assets that can create some consistency. One of the things we've talked about inside of Google marketing is about how everything is media everywhere all at once.

23:34Every surface, every touchpoint, every interaction is an opportunity to create something engaging. I want to transition into, you've talked about the moving away from an attention economy to a connection economy. Expand upon that.

23:47Samir Chaudry:So I think if you look at the eras of the internet that we've gone through, like I deeply remember first going online with AOL and Ask Jeeves and then eventually Google. And it felt like this like information era where I couldn't believe I could get access to information. And that was what publishers were giving was information. I could search something and get information. It was an amazing time. The next chapter, I think, was brought on by social media and social networking, which was the information wasn't just about cities and countries and geographies. It was about people. It was about our friends.

24:21Samir Chaudry:It was about other people we had never met before. And that brought in the attention economy, which was, huh, maybe a celebrity can be born on the Internet. And I think today, if you look at information and attention, those are pretty available. and i think all this came to a head for us when we produced a youtube short that got 41 million views and it was about the three oldest videos on youtube fun short listicle 41 million people watched it wow but i took a step back and both of us took a step back the obvious decision as a media company would be cool now we make these listicles as shorts let's make the three longest videos on youtube let's make the three shortest the three most viewed.

25:01Samir Chaudry:Yeah. Let's do this listicle format until it doesn't work anymore. But we took a step back and we were like, hmm, is anyone going to remember that video? Attention is interesting, but attention without connection is actually not interesting to us. And that's when we shifted our focus and said, how do we produce memorable minutes for people? And that's when we started to invest into live events. Our first thing we started to do was a series called Coffee with Creators, which is just take over a coffee shop. 100, 150 creators show up. We create a framework for people to connect with each other. And that's like getting back out in person with people, I think is extremely important to understand that connection.

25:49Samir Chaudry:In a world where attention is starting to become available to a lot of people who can navigate how to tell an exciting or interesting story or how to keep your attention of, let me tell you what the three oldest videos on YouTube are. You're going to want to know the third once I introduce the concept. And that for us is like long form video, repeatable formats, ways for the audience to engage, and then live events. There's something super fascinating, interesting, and all marketers need to think about and unpack, but this notion of connection, building engagement, it's what we want to do with our brands.

26:20We want to create the unfair advantage that when you go into the department store or the store or wherever it is, you're going to reach for my product, not for someone else's product. And the brand is often the differentiator. How can brands do this? How can they build better connections either through creators or overall? I mean, you guys are brand builders in your own right.

26:39Samir Chaudry:I think it's hard to think of this, but first starting with identifying the groups that you want to speak with and starting to understand those niche communities, right? Like the first thing we ever did was write out the three categories of the audience that we wanted to speak to. And we wrote it out as, okay, there's aspiring creators. There's people like us who have always wanted to make this their full-time career, but haven't really figured that out. There's professional creators, people who are making their full-time income as creators. And then there's people who work in the creator industry, people who work in and around the world of creators, maybe people who are curious about creators.

27:18Samir Chaudry:And those were our audience segments. And we would look at that and go, okay, what emotion do we want to evoke out of each of those segments? And that's where we started to explore like, okay, we want them to feel educated. We want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel inspired. What's the action we want them to take? Okay, we want them to press publish. And that's where we came up with that term from a branding perspective. So all that to say, I think it's coming back to the fundamentals of who are we trying to speak with. The reality is these groups that we just talked about, even five years ago to now, each one of those groups I just mentioned to you lives in a different section of the internet and consumes differently.

27:55Samir Chaudry:So you start to recognize like, where do these people exist and how can I create depth with my intended audience? That's not all going to be the exact same format.

28:03Colin Rosenblum:And I would say if you're trying to reach them through creators, the next step, obviously, once you identify your audiences, how do creators show up in my universe? And how do we show up in the universe of creators, which is getting to what we're talking about earlier of, you know, when we have a video and the Shopify ticker is there, they're showing up naturally in our audience, in our community, in our world, in an interesting way. When they throw an event and we're there, we're showing up in their world, right? So thinking about those two sides of how, how creators interact with you. So Samir, in this world of connection economy, me, how do you measure it?

28:36How do you prove something to a marketer to yourself that this is actually going to have a business return or some sort of positive impact?

28:42Samir Chaudry:I think for us, you know, one of the obvious metrics that's like data, empirical data is watch time. We can tell you if we're connecting both on watch time and comments, are people watching for a long time? So like just about 50 % of our viewership comes from connected TV and on connected TVs, people are watching for 48 minutes. That shows us like, all right, people are, people are really watching this. Comments? Did an episode spark conversation? Are people actually talking about this?

29:09Colin Rosenblum:I would say another data metric that we use is returning viewers. So within our YouTube studio, within our backend, because 10 million views is great. But if it's 10 million different people every month, that's not engagement for us. That's not like a true community. That's a super important metric that shows the true connection. One of the challenges with large-scale platforms is they're serving up what they think will be the most interesting video. and even if you subscribe to a to to someone it may think that some other piece of content is going to be more interesting in the short term keep more retained so you can see that on the back end or the front end having on toilet that makes sense from a marketer perspective i would

29:43Samir Chaudry:say again you have to define what success looks like for you if connection is conversions you know if like a lot of people are trying something if a lot of people are talking about it if people just have a better sentiment towards your product like i think that has to be defined and then again workshopped with the creator of how can we achieve that i think an area where marketing departments actually can help creators is we actually have invested a lot in data science quantitative analysis and actually sophisticated modeling and we've proven unequivocally that when we work with creators and we match it up with sort of regular ads when you get the mix right we drive better lift better branding comes and more sales and we call it the internally the two voice model the creator and the brand.

30:23And that mix works really, really well, proven scientifically to our CFO's approval. That's a big win for us. This podcast is called Frontier CMO, recognition that we are in uncharted territories. We need a new map, a new navigation. Talk a minute about where you think the creator business, the successful creators, but project out 2028, 2030. Obviously, technology is going to change. There's going to be lots of other factors, but there are probably some fundamentals we've already spoken about but what do you think the next big things are you said you're planning your 2026 you're thinking about stuff for 2027 2028 as well in terms of change of everything so what's the frontier for creators and for you guys as well something colin brought up that i

31:06Samir Chaudry:want to reiterate is the continued path towards interactive media i think video games have taught us a lot about depth with audiences. Stories are meant to be played, not just watched. And in 2028, I think we're just deeper in that world of interactive media. I think even if you look at a feature YouTube is testing right now of your custom feed, I get to speak to my algorithm and tell it what I want to see and change the way my suggested content shows up. I think obviously we can assume that playing with Nano Banana Pro is fun.

31:44Colin Rosenblum:And where am I comfortable with people sort of playing with the bounds of my brand? Like, where is it okay to sort of push and play within the universe? Whether that is, if you think about, again, Shopify with having a mascot, like what are the elements that people are actually going to be able to play with and move around? Over in the UK, there's a gentleman called Mark Goldbridge. He is a incredibly passionate Manchester United fan. and you know we all have our faults however he's built a wildly successful business and he's just signed the bundesliga the german league and he's going to be live streaming bundesliga games on youtube it's a fascinating changing of the guard and one of the things i'm seeing that live streaming live shopping social shopping on youtube and beyond and i think as marketers we need to see that where this is going and actually understand that i think in 2028 you'll also see a change in the guard when it comes to scripted content.

32:36Colin Rosenblum:I think historically, what you see on YouTube and across social is what Samir was saying earlier. It is this evolution of reality TV. We're used to seeing unscripted, low barrier to create, low cost. But that's coming and it already has come to social platforms. We were with a creator a couple weeks ago, a large creator named Stephen He, and he's just shooting 22-minute scripted episodes because you can now. And with people sitting on their sofas ready to watch episodic scripted content now on a platform like YouTube, once you open the doors to creators actually being able to produce it at the right cost, it's going to create this next wave of scripted episodic content.

33:18Colin Rosenblum:And I think brands can be the studios for that content. You're already seeing this on short form. There's a company called Built that's making a show called Roomies, short form scripted show. So I think you'll see brands being the studios there and you'll probably see new models of product placement, which obviously exist in film and TV, but are not as common on YouTube right now.

33:38Samir Chaudry:I think one of the challenges that a CMO, I would imagine, will face is pace. Pace is very challenging right now. I think even something I've noticed is that Spend trails like a year behind culture. Right. And I think the pace of culture is getting so fast that I would imagine there's an anxiety to move quickly on things. But quickly inside of a brand is also slower than culture. And, you know, being late is not interesting. And so if you are reacting to a moment from the year prior, you might just continuously be trying to catch up. Makes sense. So inside Google, we have this mantra in our marketing department, which is know the magic, know the user, connect the two.

34:24100%. marketers for 70 years, 100 years have said, we obsess about the customer. We obsess about the viewer, obsess about the people buying product and we don't enough. And so what you're describing is already follow your audience. You need to know where they are, why they're consuming whatever they're doing. And then you can't show up relevantly unless you understand what they need and what they're doing and what they want.

34:44Samir Chaudry:You need a chronically online person on your team and you need to listen to them, right? So final question. We've been talking a little bit about the future. I want each of you, if you'd be so kind, in 2028, what might be a side hustle that Samir is doing in addition to your ongoing work? How much time? Do we have another hour? And then Samir, what will Colin's side hustle, maybe that it's going to turn into a real business by 2028?

35:11Colin Rosenblum:Got it. I think in 2028, Samir has licensed his name, image, and likeness. and there there's every version of samir there's gardening samir there's woodworking samir i like it and they're out in the world making money in their own interesting unique ways okay like multiplicity and then there's like a samir khan where they all meet up and then it's going to go public that's funny yeah yeah yeah yeah um we're just living in samir's world yeah yeah okay okay

35:35Samir Chaudry:on the flip side i would say colin has probably launched a boutique coffee shop and breakfast sandwich place that's very it's not expanding anywhere outside of like maybe his van that he has but he pulls up opens up the trunk and you can get a breakfast sandwich and a cup of coffee and it's very community focused and it's very very neighborhood focused someone has subsidized it and it's all free and it's all free yeah and it'll last for about a month and a half but it's really well branded yeah people will talk about it what is the perfect breakfast sandwich you're serving it's just bacon egg and cheese on a roll it sounds yeah bacon butty and sounds delicious Yeah.

36:13Before we head out, I want to do a couple of rapid fire in and outs. Seems appropriate, right? So I'm going to read you some in and outs. I want your gut reaction and then we'll move on. First one, are you in or out? The client sends you a brief that says, we don't have a huge budget for paid media. You have to make it go viral.

36:28Samir Chaudry:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Out. I think virality is a byproduct of good creative. It cannot be the product that we sell. It's a byproduct of us making a great piece of content. Okay. In or out, the client hires you for your unique voice and then sends a script writer along with you to the shoot.

36:47Colin Rosenblum:I think that one's a little bit nuanced. I think like not necessarily on our own channel, I'd be out on that. But like there are times when like there are great writers in the world who are great to collaborate with. One of my themes for 2026 marketers is to be braver, to actually take on a little more risk, to actually accept that there is a creative part to this whole business. No one knows quite what's going to work, exactly when it's going to work or how it's going to work. and you gotta be brave. Yeah, for sure. Is there a piece of content that you believed in that you thought was gonna blow up or just be successful and it just didn't?

37:20Colin Rosenblum:Every video we made in the first three to four years on our channel?

37:23Samir Chaudry:Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. Okay. Yeah, every time we published a video in the first three years, we were like, this is it.

37:29Colin Rosenblum:People just don't get it, man.

37:31Samir Chaudry:Just nobody cared. But that's also representative of like the time it takes to find your voice. It's a long time to find your voice, find what works. And it's a commitment and a practice and it's just showing up every day and getting a little bit better navigating the world. Show up every day, navigate a little better. Guys, thank you so much. Really appreciate you being on Frontier CMO. Thank you. Great conversation. Before we wrap, I want to leave you with three takeaways to carry into your week. These are your field notes from the frontier. First, the pivot from attention to connection. Many marketers are still chasing vanity metrics.

38:08Millions of views on a video that fills time but leaves zero footprint. Colin and Samir argue that in 2026, views are cheap, but brand is rare. We have transitioned from an attention economy to a connection economy, where the primary metric of success is memorable minutes. Stop asking how many people saw your ad. Start asking how many people remember it. True connection happens when you move from being an interruption to a participant. Whether it's 500 people at a live event or a million viewers on a connected TV, the goal is the same, shifting from fleeting attention to depth, which is durable.

38:49Second, leverage your unfair advantage. Too many brands treat creators like a traditional media pie, handing over a script and staying at arm's length. To win, brands must identify and offer their unfair advantage, the unique assets, locations, or IP that only they can provide. Don't just give a creator a budget, give them access. If you're Red Bull, it's an F1 car. If you're Target, it's a physical store to film in. If you're Shopify, it's a physical sales ticker. When a brand provides a tool that elevates the creator's story, they stop being a sponsor and become a character in the creator's universe.

39:25Third, the audience is the new CEO. You cannot market to a community you aren't a member of. Marketers need to be chronically online. To gain conviction, you must listen to the two-voice model, the harmony between your brand's message and the creative's native understanding of their audience. In the frontier, the audience has the power to fire you. Your only job is to stay relevant to them. That's the challenge for today's marketing leaders, operating at cultural speed while protecting the credibility you can't afford to lose. Thank you for joining us. For research, case studies and tools to help you lead in this AI era, visit thinkwithgoogle.com.

40:03It's where we track the signals, challenge the noise and share what innovators are testing in real time. We'll be back next episode with another leader building the future while the rest of the industry watches. Until then, stay sharp and stay out in front.