- Rapid Campaign Launches: Brands can post briefs and begin receiving video pitches within days, slashing traditional RFP cycles.
- Equitable Creator Access: Open Call invites all Partner Program creators—micro-, mid-, and macro-influencers—to pitch, diversifying creative ideas.
- Centralized Collaboration: All communications, approvals, payments, and analytics occur within BrandConnect’s unified dashboard.
- End-to-End Measurement: Approved pitches convert to Partnership Ads with built-in reporting on views, engagement, and downstream conversions.
- Future-Ready Enhancements: YouTube plans AI-assisted matching and enriched analytics to further optimize brand–creator alignment and campaign ROI.
In the past decade, influencer marketing has transitioned from a novelty tactic to a strategic mainstay for brands seeking authentic connections. Yet, despite its growth, the process of discovering, briefing, and contracting creators often remains fragmented, requiring lengthy emails, manual RFPs, and disparate payment systems.
YouTube’s BrandConnect Platform aims to address these chronic inefficiencies with “Open Call,” a feature unveiled at the Cannes Lions festival that unifies the entire workflow.
By enabling brands to publish creative briefs directly into the BrandConnect hub and inviting any of over three million YouTube Partner Program creators to submit tailored video pitches, Open Call transforms a traditionally cumbersome back-and-forth into a single, streamlined interface.
This article delves into how Open Call works, the profound benefits it delivers for both brands and creators, and how it fits into YouTube’s broader vision of making sponsored content more agile, transparent, and measurable.
How Open Call Centralizes Collaboration
At its core, Open Call reimagines the brand–creator matchmaking process. Rather than brands individually sourcing talent through dedicated agencies or marketplaces, they now craft a detailed creative brief complete with objectives, deliverables, expected formats, and budget ranges, and publish it directly on BrandConnect.
Creators log into the same platform where they already manage subscriptions, ad revenue, and partnership histories. Upon seeing an Open Call brief, creators record and submit their own custom video pitch, often featuring sample product integrations, visual treatments, and tentative scripts.
Brands then review submissions side by side, offer feedback within the interface, and instantly approve the pitches they wish to sponsor. Once approved, these creator-produced videos become “Partnership Ads” that brands can activate in their YouTube ad campaigns, complete with performance tracking built into BrandConnect.
This end-to-end integration replaces a patchwork of tools, spreadsheets for tracking proposals, email chains for negotiations, and invoicing systems for payments. Instead, Open Call leverages YouTube’s existing infrastructure: creators receive notification badges for new briefs, brands monitor submission statuses in real time, and payment disbursements are handled through the same Partner Program revenue-sharing mechanism.
The result is a dramatic reduction in administrative overhead, faster time-to-market for campaigns, and a more transparent process for all stakeholders.
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Brand Benefits: Agility, Scale, and Creative Diversity
Brands adopting Open Call immediately reap three core advantages:
- Agility in Campaign Launches
- Traditional influencer partnerships can take weeks or months from initial outreach to content go-live. Open Call compresses this timeline to days by eliminating intermediaries and empowering brands to view and approve pitches in one centralized platform.
- Scalable Access to Talent
- By broadcasting briefs to every YouTube Partner Program creator, brands are no longer constrained by pre-existing agency rosters or personal networks. Whether seeking niche tech reviewers, lifestyle vloggers, or high-profile entertainers, Open Call unlocks a global talent pool instantly.
- Enhanced Creative Diversity
- Receiving multiple custom pitches on a single influencer brief surfaces a wider spectrum of creative ideas. Brands can compare varied storytelling approaches—humor vs. tutorial styles, short-form vs. long-form concepts—and select those that best align with their brand voice and campaign objectives.
Beyond these headline benefits, BrandConnect’s analytics layer tracks each pitch’s performance once it becomes a Partnership Ad. Brands gain visibility into metrics such as view-through rates, click-through rates, audience retention curves, and downstream conversions, all tied back to individual creator submissions.
This data-driven feedback loop allows marketers to iterate rapidly, refining subsequent briefs based on what resonated most with real audiences.
Creator Advantages: Opportunity, Autonomy, and Monetization
Open Call is equally transformative for creators of all sizes. In the past, smaller or emerging creators often struggled to break into sponsored content due to limited agency connections or a high bar for pitch quality. With Open Call:
- Equitable Entry: All Partner Program creators—regardless of subscriber count—can discover and apply to briefs that align with their niche expertise. This democratizes access and levels the playing field.
- Autonomy in Pitching: Creators craft their own narrative and control the creative direction of their submissions. This autonomy fosters authentic integrations that resonate with their audience, rather than templated brand messages imposed by agencies.
- Streamlined Monetization: Upon selection, creators transition seamlessly from pitch to paid partnership. Payments are managed through YouTube’s revenue-sharing system, eliminating invoicing headaches and ensuring timely compensation.
Furthermore, BrandConnect’s dashboard provides creators with clear visibility into the status of their pitches: which briefs they’ve applied to, which are under review, and which have been approved.
Creators can also track performance metrics once their videos go live as Partnership Ads, enabling them to understand which types of content drive the most engagement and plan future pitches accordingly.
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Integration with YouTube’s Broader BrandConnect Ecosystem
Open Call is the latest addition to a suite of tools within YouTube’s BrandConnect Platform, designed to streamline the end-to-end influencer marketing process.
Key companion offerings include:
- Insights Finder (Beta): A discovery tool that leverages Google’s ML algorithms to identify creators whose audiences align with a brand’s target demographics and interests.
- Partnership Ads: Branded content that appears as in-feed ads, seamlessly blending creator authenticity with measurement capabilities in Google Ads and YouTube Analytics.
- Shorts Monetization Options: Enabling creators to attract brand deals specific to short-form content, reflecting evolving consumer consumption patterns.
By embedding Open Call into this ecosystem, YouTube ensures that brands can move fluidly from audience research and creator discovery to briefing, pitching, and performance measurement, all without leaving the platform. This closed-loop solution reduces friction, centralizes data, and fosters closer collaboration between marketers and creators.
Measuring Success: KPIs and Early Feedback
Although Open Call remains in limited beta for select advertisers, early adopters have reported substantial workflow efficiencies and promising creative outcomes.
Brands measure success across several KPIs:
- Pitch Volume and Quality: Tracking the number of submissions per brief and evaluating the diversity of creative approaches.
- Time-to-Launch: Comparing elapsed days from brief publication to approved video post-launch against previous RFP-based partnerships.
- Engagement Metrics: Analyzing view-through rates, average watch time, and audience retention for Partnership Ads derived from Open Call.
- Conversion Tracking: Monitoring click-through rates and e-commerce transactions directly tied to branded content, where applicable.
Marketers have noted that Open Call briefs yield three to five times more submissions than typical agency-solicited RFPs, and that the centralized review process cuts decision cycles by up to 60 percent. These early indicators point to a future where influencer marketing operates with the precision and speed of programmatic advertising, but retains the authenticity that only human creators can deliver.
The Future of BrandConnect Open Call
YouTube plans a broader rollout of Open Call later this year, accompanied by iterative enhancements:
- AI-Powered Matching: Automated recommendations that suggest optimal creator briefs based on historical performance and audience alignment.
- Dynamic Brief Templates: Guided question flows and creative prompt libraries to help brands craft more effective briefs.
- Integrated Workflow with Google Ads: Streamlining the transition from Partnership Ad approval to paid media activation within Google’s ad ecosystem.
As these features arrive, Open Call will further blur the lines between content ideation and paid distribution, ushering in an era of truly integrated, data-driven creator marketing.
For brands and creators alike, BrandConnect’s Open Call represents not just a new tool but a paradigm shift in how sponsored content is conceived, executed, and measured on YouTube’s unrivaled global stage.
