How to Advertise on YouTube

Want to advertise on YouTube? Up until very recently, advertisers only had the following options:

• Upload your own video
• Run contextual ads through Yahoo, cross fingers
• Become a movie studio or record label and try to get a "featured" video on the homepage
• Spam the comments section of other people's videos

Needless to say, these aren't very attractive options for advertisers. YouTube wants to change that. They need the advertising revenue, but they want the ads to be relevant. This sentiment was echoed in a recent interview Charlie Rose conducted with the co-founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.

Yesterday, YouTube unveiled new options for advertisers. Here they are:

1. Create Your Own Brand Channel
   This is basically a "custom" profile for the advertiser. "Custom", in this case, means a background image, a different color palette, and a graphic masthead. The Paris Hilton Brand Channel, from Warner Bros. Records, is one of the first. YouTube will actively drive traffic to these brand channels.
2. Sponsor A Brand Channel
   As you can see from the above example, the Paris Hilton Brand Channel is actually sponsored by Prison Break. This is a great opportunity for advertisers to get involved that may not have any content to create a brand channel of their own.
3. Participatory Video Ads
   This is a fancy way of saying a video ad that's able to play directly on the homepage. They're called "participatory" because users are allowed to rate, comment on and share the video, but that's what users are allowed to do on all the other videos on the site. One of the benefits is that these video ads are accompanied by some display advertising, such as a small banner unit above the video on the YouTube homepage and a larger 728x90 on the individual video page.

Overall, I think the "brand channel" idea is really interesting. Small design elements allow advertisers to cut through the clutter by offering an experience that stands out. Actually, I think it would be smart move for YouTube to amplify the social networking aspect of their website to allow ALL users to customize the design of their profiles. It worked for MySpace, right? Update: YouTube does allow you to customize basic design elements of your profile, but the "masthead" on the Paris Hilton channel appears to be one of the things advertisers can do that the average user cannot.

You can read more about these new advertising options from YouTube in these articles from the Financial Times and Washington Post.

Links via Micropersuasion and Marketing Vox.