On 21 October 2026, YouTube promoted its report on the intention era on LinkedIn with the line “Attention is a metric. Intention is a mindset.” Yet in The Intent Advantage report, YouTube backs up the result of a creator’s video with two metrics, cost per view and click-through rate. The video was made by comedian Adam W for the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s. He shot it in a real branch of the chain. The report is meant to explain to marketers how video viewing is changing, and the research firm Kantar ran the survey behind it at YouTube’s request.
Kantar surveyed American video viewers
Kantar surveyed 7,621 American viewers who watch video every week. They answered the questionnaire between December 2025 and January 2026. In it, YouTube measured itself against nine competitors, from linear TV and streaming services to social networks. Kantar’s figures on viewer intent therefore rest on what viewers say. According to the report, 68% of respondents say a creator’s context or expertise gives them the confidence to buy.
Buying on recommendation was examined in May 2026 by a survey of 2,000 consumers in the Czech Republic, which the agency Censuswide carried out for the payments company Adyen. According to Research Live, the Czech Republic is missing from the 33 markets in the consumer survey of Kantar’s Media Reactions 2026 study, while other European Union countries are included. Nearly 37% of Czech respondents are more likely to buy something recommended by people they know, influencers or celebrities. In that question, an influencer is just one of three options. A fifth of respondents trust recommendations from online creators more than traditional advertising.
The report illustrates creator advertising with precisely this short video Adam W made for YouTube Shorts. According to him, shooting on location alone raised the production value, and because he had that opportunity, he wanted a boat. He took on the script and the directing himself and turned the branch into a romantic upscale restaurant “the James Jonathan way”. The quick-service experience gave way to candlelight and table service. Sandwiches are toasted tableside, Tuscan wraps are hand-delivered by a gondolier and desserts sit on silver carts.
In the intention era report, the gondolier became a cost per view and a measure of how often people clicked. Adam W himself sums up the video’s impact in the report with the line “For a brand deal to get millions of views organically is kind of insane.”
Adam W got creative freedom, Inspire Brands measured the results
Adam W credits both the brand and the influencer marketing agency for letting him be the creator and giving him creative freedom. The agency Influential works on the principle of “guardrails, not scripts”, explains Kristen Dolan, its senior vice president of growth. The agency outlines the brand messaging and the must-haves. The delivery stays entirely in the creator’s voice. The creator sees that freedom as the reason the video “turned out so good and performed very well”.
In February 2026, Lauren Johnson, media strategy and planning manager at Inspire Brands, put numbers on the video’s performance in a Think with Google case study. According to her, the cost per view (CPV) was 62% more efficient than for non-influencer creatives. The report draws her figures from Inspire Brands’ own data and from the Think with Google website. It states explicitly that they do not come from the Kantar survey. For the gondolier video, the intention era report gives a click-through rate 158% higher than for non-influencer creatives.
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