Soda - Keeping Curious

This week the popular video sharing site YouTube unleashed it’s first branded channels. YouTube, which attracts over 100 million video views a day, has been cautious with advertising in the past. Firstly they have not wanted to damage their popularity by bombarding users with advertising and secondly, perhaps more importantly, advertisers have been wary about being linked with inappropriate home-made videos or illegal copies of professional material.

But now that all looks set to change. YouTube’s first branded channel is a promotional channel from Warner Brothers Records based on Hollywood socialite Paris Hilton and her recently released album. Basically, the brand channels work in a similar way to the basic YouTube channel. Users can upload their videos to the channel, but instead of simply attracting an audience, this user generated content also serves to promote the brand. These channels can also be sponsored, in the Paris channel’s case the sponsor is Fox’s TV show Prison Break. This means that a smattering of Prison Break videos and advertising are also viewable on the Paris channel.

A second initiative unveiled by YouTube this week is participatory video ads (PVAs). The PVAs are placed directly on the homepage and basically allow users to treat adverts on the same way they treat the other content of YouTube by rating them, sharing them and commenting on them. Apparently, the first PVA was an advert for the film “Pulse”?. YouTube founder and CEO Chad Hurley claims the advert was viewed 900,000 times in four days.

This is another example of advertising moving into social networking sites (see also News Corp’s purchase of MySpace). Ultimately what social networking can offer is an in depth demographic profile of the individual user and all their friends. It will be interesting to see developments in targeted advertising. I would like to see the day when the adverts served on a particular site are carefully chosen to be interesting and relevant to the individual consumer.