Most brands have a YouTube presence. Far fewer have a YouTube strategy, according to Norm de Greve, the former chief marketing officer of General Motors.

The distinction matters, de Greve argues, because the platform has become too large and too fragmented across internal teams for a presence-only approach to deliver results. During his decade-plus tenure as CMO of General Motors, he saw firsthand how the pieces of a YouTube program tend to end up scattered across an organization.

The pattern is familiar at large advertisers. The paid team runs ads on the platform. The owned team manages the brand channel, and that channel frequently operates with little strategic direction — de Greve describes it as "often by posting videos into the void." A separate group, or a separate set of relationships, handles creator partnerships.

The result, de Greve says, is that nobody in the organization is looking at the whole picture. Paid media, owned content and creator collaborations each operate as isolated workstreams rather than as components of a single platform strategy.

A Structural Problem, Not a Content Problem

De Greve's diagnosis shifts the blame away from creative quality or platform choice and toward marketing structure. Brands that underperform on YouTube, in his framing, are not necessarily making bad videos or buying the wrong media. They are organizing themselves in a way that makes coordinated YouTube investment nearly impossible.

The paid team optimizes for campaign delivery. The owned team posts to a subscriber base it may not be actively growing. The creators function sits elsewhere again, sometimes within influencer marketing, sometimes within media, sometimes with agencies. Each silo can hit its own targets while the brand's collective footprint on the platform underperforms.

For a company the scale of General Motors, where de Greve spent more than ten years in the top marketing seat, the coordination challenge compounds. Multiple brands, multiple agencies and multiple internal teams all touch the same platform, and without a unifying strategy the pieces do not add up.

The So-What for Marketers

De Greve's assessment lands as brands continue to shift video budgets toward YouTube and as the platform expands its role in retail media, connected TV and creator-driven advertising. If his structural diagnosis is right, the fix is organizational: someone senior needs ownership of the full YouTube picture, spanning paid, owned and creator activity.

For B2B and consumer marketers alike, the takeaway is a governance question before it is a content question. Until a brand can name who owns its total YouTube footprint, it is — in de Greve's words — posting into the void, regardless of how much it spends.

De Greve's full critique of brand YouTube practices, drawn from his decade-plus leading marketing at General Motors, offers a roadmap for marketers rethinking how they organize around the platform as it becomes a bigger share of media plans.