Aditi Harish knows the power of an online community. The USC Iovine and Young Academy alumna is currently a product marketing manager at YouTube Shorts. When she’s not working with Shorts creators, she’s making videos that showcase her personal creativity. It’s the best of both digital worlds – she’s both a content marketer and a content creator herself. 

At her fast-paced day job, Harish is on the trends team at YouTube Shorts (shorts meaning just that – videos that run under 60 seconds). Whether a video trend involves a song, challenge, or another form of shared media, Harish is responsible for helping creators stay up to date on Shorts. She’s essentially a virtual trendsetter - or rather, trend-sharer – helping influencers and video-makers grow their YouTube channels.

Harish kicked off her career post-graduation on the ad strategy side of Google, eventually hopping over to YouTube Shorts to work on immersive campaigns like Coachella and VidCon. When she transitioned to trends, she realized not only was she educating creators on how to be better content connoisseurs, she was teaching herself too. Since the isolating early days of the pandemic, Harish has been building her own social media presence, producing and posting original beauty-focused videos. 

What started as just “doing makeup in [her] room” became a side hustle that served as a creative outlet to pass the time. She’s still creating today, learning every day from her job at Youtube, while reaching audiences in ways she could never imagine. One of her recent shorts went viral and garnered 8 million views, earning her 10,000 Youtube subscribers almost immediately. Her makeup looks have been featured in Cosmopolitan and she partnered with E.L.F. Cosmetics last year. 

Making connections through the magic of the world wide web is a passion for Harish, and one motivating factor is her commitment to South Asian representation. 

“That’s one of the biggest drivers for me. I started creating content because I saw other brown girls creating content. I was like, ‘oh, I don’t have to look like this person to make content. I can do this and have a career out of it’ … It makes the internet a special place, the fact that anyone can be who they want to be,” she remarks.

Through her job and with posting personally, Harish has seen the ins and outs of how trends can operate and proliferate on the platform – what resonates with people and what captures their attention and imaginations. 

“Obviously on the internet there are a ton of different niches, especially in short form videos. There are things like slime content and Barbiecore content – very, very niche things. But when a trend is broad enough and can be specific enough, it tends to do really well. The format really matters. The song really matters. All those kinds of things make a trend what it is and they take off more if more people can participate in it,” she explains. 

Harish has always been interested in business and being creative, but she didn’t want to lose the tech side that she fostered in high school, from robotics to coding, which is how she found herself at IYA. Now that she’s been at Google and Youtube since graduation, Harish recognizes the unique skill set she brings to the company because of her time in college. “Navigating ambiguity” is an ability that has taken her this far, both personally and professionally. 

“It’s so helpful, being able to dabble in different things that make a tech company what it is. Youtube is a marketing platform, it is a tech business,” she says. “I felt like I was already in a business environment by my senior year [at IYA]. The transition from senior year to corporate life felt a little easier to me, like I was already working at a company. Obviously, entrepreneurship and corporate life can be different, but there are similarities in terms of how to handle business and how to work with people. That set me up quite well.” 

It’s no surprise that Harish ended up deeply entrenched in the influencer world. The creator economy phenomenon has intrigued her since age 10. Now that she’s working directly with creators and is one herself, she recognizes the unique position they’re in, and she hopes to debunk the perception that all they do is get free stuff and “invited to cool events because they pretend to be famous.” 

“The way that I think of it is each creator is essentially a small business in itself. Depending on what kind of content you create, every single one is a small business. People that create content, bare minimum, they are the producer, the editor, the photographer, the filmer, the content strategist. All those things in one person. Then, on top of that, so many people have businesses that come out of their following. So if you’re a food creator, you might have a food line or a line of pots and pans in collaboration with different companies,” she shares.

 “I have landed in the perfect spot in being behind the scenes and also being in front of the scenes. I get to do a little bit of both. It’s always where I wanted to end up after I graduated.” 

Harish is essentially a virtual trendsetter - or rather, trend-sharer – helping influencers and video-makers grow their YouTube channels.

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