Hey y’all,

My wife and I like to watch YouTube together, usually while we’re eating lunch or dinner.

And it’s all the usual suspects: RealLifeLore, TastingHistory with Max Miller, LegalEagle. We like something funny or educational, so we can chat about it.

Anyway, we recently started watching Evan and Katelyn.

And immediately, there were some pretty huge things that stood out to me.

This last one is huge for me. We usually skip over YouTube ads. We never skip one of theirs.

We’ve all seen a Squarespace ad. As many ads as they buy, they should probably own shares at YouTube (right there alongside HelloFresh, Factor, etc.)

But you’ve never seen one like this.

It opens in an interrogation room. A woman is accused of building a terrible looking website. The couple appear as two German (?) agents explaining what Squarespace does in what appears to be a parody of bad ads.

It got me thinking: there are so many incredible, ultra-creative people who partner with brands, but their ads don’t hit like this.

Why?

And how could brands leverage these super creative, funny people to make ads that are unskippable – and not in the “YouTube-says-you-have-to-watch-45-seconds” unskippable way?

For an ad to land, it’s got to fit into the creator’s world.

I found one of Evan’s ads from Asus – and the sponsored ad is such a small footnote in the overall video.

Evan is repairing a wooden and resin computer he’d made – replacing the graphics card with a gifted one from Asus.

But, in most of the video Evan is struggling to get this computer to work. He’s formatting, deleting, installing. He goes on a side quest to his attic to find a product key . (He doesn’t find it but break the ceiling instead.) The actual graphics card only enters the chat toward the end of the video.

In the Creator Trust Report 2026 (out today!) we found that when a product didn’t make sense for a creator, trust among the audience dropped. This ad works because because it makes sense in the creator’s world.

It completely checks out that he’d need to replace a graphics card – and it’s all done in the same humor and style as the rest of their videos. It’s pure chaos – and a kind of energy Asus would never be able to harness without these creators.

Their skits are so wildly unserious – and that’s what makes them make sense.

They’re so incredibly kitsch, so corny, and so perfect – because it’s them.

Because these are two people who are incredibly creative. They’re naturally funny, charismatic – and they make you want to keep watching. The ads fit into their content seamlessly – so much so, that they don’t have to do that YouTuber “random segue in the middle of a sentence that seems forced.”

Could you imagine how much it would suck if they used the brand-provided videos and voice-overed the Squarespace talking points?

You’d skip it along with every other ad you come across.

(And I don’t know how we got away from this – because I can’t be the only person who remembers the Budweiser Frogs or the WAZZUPPPP commercials from the early 2000s.)

But here, Squarespace just lets them do their thing – and it’s magical. They trust Evan and Katelyn to be as weird as possible, and it makes the ad memorable.

You’ve got a brand to think about – and that means that you can’t always do the unhinged stuff that makes an ad memorable. We can’t all be Duolingo or SURREAL, right?

But the cool thing is – working with a creator that’s weird can actually give you permission to be weird too. Within reason, of course.

And when weird can align with value-adds (such as a product being easy to use), you’ve got magic in the making.

Again, take Squarespace – who worked with Evan and Katelyn to sponsor a video about making…

*checks notes*

… a mood ring toilet seat.

They ended up making a joke about selling the toilet seats in the video – and it was a natural work-in for a Squarespace ecommerce site.

In fact, they bought the domain during the video and made the site as a joke.

And how easy a sell is it that they were able to buy a domain and create a full ecommerce website as a joke – if it weren’t easy to use Squarespace to do it in the first place?

Complete with one of their affiliate links towards the sponsor integrated right into the site’s map itself.

And there’s just no way this works – unless Squarespace is chill enough to let it work. It’s weird so it grabs your attention, and it works perfectly to highlight what Squarespace wants to highlight, without feeling like they’re reading from a script.

It all goes back to trust – if you can trust a creator to do what they do best, you’re going to end up with something so much better than you could have come up with yourself.

A creative or funny influencer is such a gift to this world. They’re out here doing the things that we’d all do with infinite time.

(No? Just me? Okay.)

To me, it seems like brands are stuck on how exactly to work with them. Maybe we’re all just hung up on the talking points, or being taken seriously, or not appearing too weird. And then the ad just doesn’t land.

But working with a super creative influencer or a comedian gives you license to do that:

And finally, stop sleeping on these incredible creators.

Off to buy moodring paint in bulk,
Whitney 🦇
Content R&D at Modash. Send hate mail to LinkedIn

Have you saved your seat for Return on Influence Festival '26? An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world. 

The day is organized around four stages. Gabriel Gomez is hosting The Feed, while Sarah Whittle will be on the mic for the Future of Influence stage.

They’re not taking the news well.

You’ll also hear from Georgia Humphries at Stanley 1913, Tess Allen at goodwipes, Maya Shaff at ŌURA, Leah Walker at Adobe and even more.

It’s free, it’s online, and you’ll take away something you can apply to your job the very next day.

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