📈 MrBeast wants to Fix Creator Ads

Today’s Insights

Welcome. In this edition we’re looking at MrBeast’s latest philanthropic push, a $40M fundraiser to bring clean water to 2M people (we’re supporting) that’s also a highly ambitious marketing campaign to coordinate 3,000 creators around one unified message.

MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) is 25 years old. His mission is to “make kindness go viral.” And he could also now be getting into the ad tech business too.

—Kole, Nelson, Helen, Mayank

Feature

MrBeast has rallied 3,000 content creators across 84 countries in a $40M push to fund clean water projects for 2 million people globally.

Called the “biggest ever YouTube collab,” the campaign features creators like Johnny Harris (7M subs), who released an investigative video on why we spend $350B on bottled water.

Most of Harris’ video delivers value through storytelling and insight, holding attention before introducing the campaign at the end.

That teach → earn → ask sequence lowers ad-blindness, keeps retention high (helping distribution), and makes the CTA feel like a natural conclusion rather than an interruption.

What else we learned

In promoting the fundraiser, MrBeast pointed to a gap in creator marketing infrastructure: CMOs want to put more significant budgets into creator partnerships, but can’t execute at scale because of platform limitations, fragmented deals, and weak performance data.

"There's no way for large brands to deploy large sums of money into brand deals for creators. Everyone knows instead of buying a YouTube ad that's skippable, paying the creator directly to promote your product would convert much better."

His solution, as usual, is to build the infrastructure himself.

Coordinating thousands of creators to raise $40M in 30 days is both a philanthropic milestone and a proof of concept for the next phase of creator marketing.

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📊 Google Ads introduces ‘Branded Searches’ to measure brand interest after ad views

Advertisers can measure how often users search for their brand on Google or YouTube within 30 days of seeing an ad. Branded Searches are available across Video, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns. Although it can’t be used as an optimization goal.

📢 Google is starting to pitch keywordless ads in AI Mode ahead of Q4 launch

AdWeek reports that Ads in AI Mode will be placed based on the full conversation context within AI responses and not traditional search terms. The ad format will remain text-based like standard search ads, while shopping ads will display product images and prices within the conversational interface.

📈 Q2 2025 ad revenue increases across Google, Meta, Reddit, Amazon and Microsoft

The digital ad industry giants all reported growth in ad spending. Google’s ad revenue hit $71B, up 10% year over year, with YouTube ads alone rising 13% to $10B. Sundar Pichai said the results were in part down to “strategic investments in AI and video.”

💡 Meta is reportedly developing a new AI-powered search product

Agency executives told Digiday that Meta is quietly building a search product that is likely to be integrated within Meta AI. While details are light, early versions expected to arrive before the 2025 holiday season.

🤖 Apple is also exploring a ChatGPT-like 'answer engine'

According to Bloomberg, a new team at Apple is developing an AI system that gathers information from the web. This project could either result in a standalone app or enhance the search features in Siri, Safari, and Spotlight.

🔒 OpenAI has stopped ChatGPT conversations appearing in Google search

This follows reports that thousands of shared conversations were publicly accessible. OpenAI described the feature as an experiment that created too many risks of accidental exposure.

💬 X plans to introduce ads in Grok’s responses

Elon Musk says the plan is to allow advertisers to pay to appear in Grok’s answers in order to “pay for those expensive GPUs”. He also hinted at plans to improve ad targeting using xAI’s technology.

Thanks for reading

✦ Missed last week’s edition? We posted a visual recap on LinkedIn.

✦ Join us in supporting MrBeast’s #TeamWater campaign.

✦ Senior Marketers, Wynter will pay you to give feedback on other B2B websites, ads, and messaging. Their surveys take 2-10 minutes. And they pay up to $50. (US/Canada based)

We’ll be back next week!