In a video that agency strategist Dan Salkey came across on 21 October, the creator Adéla said she had just deleted social media, then went straight on to praise a YouTube channel run by a grown-up former child star. US agencies see YouTube mainly as video and television, yet a brand's own channel remains out of sight for most of the teams that run advertising there. The survey of people at US media agencies was published in January 2026. Only 24% of advertising teams in it were involved in, or at least had visibility into, the unpaid, so-called organic strategy of brand channels.
Salkey, co-founder of the creative agency Small World, sees only an apparent paradox in Adéla deleting social media while enjoying a YouTube channel, and in his view she is a step ahead of most media plans. “In her mind, YouTube is television. It's chosen, it's not a feed or algorithm that just foists itself on you,” he wrote about her. For brands, in his view, YouTube is usually a graveyard of product demos. Most of Gen Z, he says, has already reclassified YouTube as television, but most agencies have not.
Gen Z in Czechia put YouTube on in the background, for instance while eating or doing housework, considerably more often than the rest of the population. This was captured in April 2026 by an Ipsos survey for Forbes among a thousand people aged 15 to 65. Seven in ten respondents turned on YouTube at least once a week. Most people gave the video their full attention.
How US agencies place YouTube between video, television and social media
According to Salkey, most agencies still keep YouTube in the social line of their media plans next to TikTok and feed it vertical offcuts. Pixability, a company that supplies brands and agencies with technology for YouTube advertising, asked people at US agencies in the same survey what they consider YouTube to be. Of these, 73% described it as a standalone video platform and 63% as a connected TV platform, meaning internet-connected television sets (CTV). More than one answer could be chosen. Only half saw it as a social network.
More than half, 53% of the people who run YouTube advertising at US agencies, had nothing at all to do with other work on YouTube. In the survey, other work means, for example, channel management or creator sponsorships. According to Pixability, larger agencies often run brand, performance, CTV, creators and organic content in separate teams, while smaller independent agencies coordinate them more flexibly.
A creator show on the Hot Topic channel
Salkey's agency released organic content for the Hot Topic brand channel as an episode of the show Hot Takes. Salkey credits it with a star-studded creator cast, genuinely funny questions and none of the corporate mediocrity that many big brands end up with. He calls it the best-performing thing on the channel in five years. The eighteen-minute episode, featuring four creators and actors, had 69,875 views as of 21 October, a week after release.
The episode with a creator cast has more views than the festival interviews with bands that filled the channel before it. The interviews from the When We Were Young 2024 festival that are visible on the Videos tab had between 239 and 14 thousand views. On the Videos tab, only videos older than five years have more views than Hot Takes.
In the discussion under Salkey's post, Duane Holland of TikTok, a rival platform, borrowed the name Hot Takes. He introduced his comment as a “Hot Take”. In it he turned the television comparison around and wrote that a “heritage digital platform spends decades convincing the media industry it's more like TV. Achieves goal, then spends decades convincing it's less dull than TV.”
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