YouTubers pitch fan obsession with their lives as a secret weapon for marketers

• Creator startup Spotter held its first upfront-style event Thursday, matching YouTubers with marketers.
• Creators like Ryan Trahan and Jordan Matter pitched brands on sponsoring future videos.
• Several of the creators made the case that parasocial fandom is a great way to sell stuff.

Hey brands, want to sponsor my daughter's 16th birthday?

That was the pitch YouTuber Jordan Matter threw out to a room full of marketers on Thursday during creator startup Spotter's first upfront-style event. The showcase was an opportunity for YouTubers like Matter, Dude Perfect, Ryan Trahan, and MrBeast to lay out their content slate for the coming year. The goal? Woo brands into buying ads on their videos.

For Matter, who posts content with his family, the big upcoming tentpole event was his daughter Salish's 16th birthday. "Anybody represent any automobile manufacturers here?" he asked the crowd.

He pointed out that Salish's birthday falls in the fourth quarter, a time when brands are shelling out their biggest ad budgets. "Lucky us," Matter said.

The creator-run presentations mirrored the annual upfront pitches from TV broadcasters or NewFront sessions hosted by digital platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. But several of the creators who took the stage at Spotter's event were pitching something slightly different: their obsessively loyal, parasocial audiences. (Parasocial relationships are when fans imagine they have a friendship with a celebrity they don't personally know.)

"An influencer invites you into their home every week, and you feel like you're a part of their family," Matter told the crowd. "They have such a deep connection with their audience that transcends, I think, kind of anything you can find elsewhere."

Once you have that level of fan loyalty, you can sell almost anything. Perhaps, that makes your content a better place to put ads than a traditional TV or streaming show. That's at least what Spotter hoped the marketers would take away from the event.

"Let's be clear, creators are the networks of today," Spotter's president Nic Paul told the crowd. "They are delivering the hit shows that are attracting audience attention at scale."

YouTube was the biggest platform for US TV viewing in February, ahead of companies like Netflix, Disney, and Fox, per Nielsen's "Media Distributor Gauge," which looks at viewership across cable, streaming, and other distributors.

Some of the Spotter creators' shows could comfortably live on traditional television. During the presentations, YouTuber Airrack announced plans to climb Mount Everest for a coming video project. Creators Sam and Colby are planning to drop a new paranormal video series. Creator Kinigra Deon said she's putting together a movie in collaboration with Kevin Hart's entertainment company. And Melissa Drucker, MrBeast's global brand partnerships lead, took the stage to talk about the return of his Amazon series, "Beast Games."

But others, like Matter, pitched content that veered deeper into their personal lives.

YouTuber Rebecca Zamolo, who has over 18 million subscribers on her main YouTube channel, was looking for brand partners for a back-to-school-themed video series that would overlap with the birth of her second child, for example.

"Baby No. 2 will also be arriving when back to school hits, so, even more of a reason for our audience to be excited and to increase engagement even more," she said.

Zamolo said she earlier used a blue can of Poppi in a sponsored video to reveal the gender of her next child to her daughter.

Creators are uniquely positioned to sell stuff

Sponsoring a video about a birthday, wedding proposal, or childbirth is certainly not new in the influencer business.

But there was something a little jarring about hearing a father court brands for "integrations" tied to his teenager's birthday.

That said, he makes a fair point that Salish's deeply loyal follower base, combined with YouTube's growing market share among TV viewers, positions her and the rest of the creator cohort very well to sell stuff.

For example, MrBeast makes more money from selling his Feastables chocolates than he does from his videos, Bloomberg reported, citing company documents sent to investors.

Trahan made a similar point when he talked about converting his 19.4 million subscribers into strong evangelists for his candy brand, Joyride.

"My audience is on a mission to make it a top-selling candy in Target," Trahan told the Spotter crowd. "This is such a great example of what can happen whenever you give the creators an opportunity to tell their audience a mission that they believe in."