Advertising as art: Mosaics on YouTube

One of the most valuable YouTube tools for advertisers is the brand channel -- a branded home for all your videos within the YouTube ecosystem. Just as our content partners create more elaborate, customized YouTube channels to host their videos, advertisers -- from Coldwell Banker to Johnson's -- also use the interactive features available in brand channels to connect with consumers.

The most successful brand channels are those with lots of videos for users to engage with, but sometimes it can be a challenge to navigate through all those videos. To help with this, more and more advertisers have been creating gadgets (simple web applications) that live on the brand channel and use YouTube's APIs to present the videos in engaging ways. We thought it would be useful to pitch in, so we've created a set of standard gadgets for advertisers to use on YouTube. We call these gadgets "engagement products," since they are designed to increase user engagement and interaction with an advertiser's brand.

Volkswagen is currently using one of our newest engagement products -- called Mosaic -- on their German brand channel www.youtube.com/myvolkswagen. Mosaic takes thumbnail images for hundreds of videos and automatically arranges them into any image an advertiser supplies. The user can then navigate around all the videos with ease and play them within the mosaic. In only a few short days, one hundred thousand users have already checked out Volkswagen's mosaic.

If you're interested in using Mosaic or another YouTube standard gadget to make your brand channel easier to navigate, please contact your YouTube representative.

Posted by Peter Sherman, Product Marketing Manager