Show and Tell – YouTube Style
(Written by guest contributor Chris Harper)
When most of us hear the phrase “show and tell” our minds naturally drift back to those awkward events from our childhoods that required us to bring something interesting to school to share with the class. Drawing on that tradition, YouTube has launched a new Show and Tell channel that they operate in partnership with the Art Directors Club, that aims to show off interesting and effective ways that advertisers are using YouTube.
The site features examples of viral videos, brand channels, interactive videos (yes, apparently you can do that on YouTube now), and well designed homepages which have all been hand-selected by the folks from the Art Directors Club and YouTube. And given that I love creative advertising, it’s nice to have some good examples of it identified and collected in one place. As I wrote in an article a few weeks ago, I’m always looking for inspiration and this site is now bookmarked in my browser.
As for interactive content, I really had no idea you could do that kind of stuff on YouTube, so I found that to be of particular interest. Among other things, users can add closed-captioning to videos and create links to other videos based on when they click the link on your video. In other words, you can direct viewers to click on your video and depending on when they click, they can be taken to another video that corresponds to a click at that time. It’s like a choose your own adventure book – YouTube style. YouTube has created it’s own interactive campaign about a card to show you all the possibilities, and watching that will give you a much better explanation than I can write here. It’s pretty cool stuff, and definitely goes beyond what I thought was possible on YouTube. It does have it’s limitations, though. One of those is the fact that when you click you are actually taken to another video on YouTube, which means you have to wait for your browser to redirect and the new video to load. So it’s not quite like playing a Flash based game with instantaneous results.
Now before you start thinking YouTube’s doing this great service for its viewers to inspire more creativity and better quality from its contributors, think again. For YouTube, the Show and Tell site is basically an advertisement for its brand channels – a high end advertising solution that gives clients increased customization of their channels, while still generally appearing to be a regular old YouTube channel. In other words, it’s advertising in disguise. Of course, you can get a brand channel of your own, but YouTube isn’t divulging much about the cost and speculators are guessing the prices reach into the six-figure range.
