We're pleased to have Ad Age curating the YouTube homepage today, in a spotlight that celebrates the creative revolution going on now in the advertising and marketing business. In other words, these are ads you won't want to miss. Ad Age digital lead Michael Learmonth and Creativity managing editor Ann Diaz explain further in the video and guest post below:

We, in the business press, love to obsess over YouTube's business model, whether it can make money from the world's video through advertising. But today Advertising Age is curating the front page of YouTube to help tell an even bigger story, and that's YouTube's impact on advertising itself.

Once, TV ads were pretty much foisted on the public. Turn on the TV, and they were there. Some were great; most were not. Indeed, in some TV ads the intent is to annoy and grab the attention of a passive public. Enter YouTube. And while all of that is still true, the marketing world now has another powerful, democratic vehicle to reach a TV-sized audience. But there's a catch: the ad has to be something people want to watch.

Each day, YouTube is a global referendum on the world's video, and ads are very much a part of that mix. TV ads have always had the power of sight, sound and motion; now, to reach an audience in an on-demand world, they also have to delight, entertain and tell a story. That has inspired a creative revolution in the advertising and marketing business, just as it has in entertainment and attracted new talent to the industry. It has also refocused the industry away from obsessing over who's skipping the ads to producing ads no one wants to skip. Just like you can buy a 30-second spot on TV, you can also buy media on YouTube, but you can also earn an audience there, and increasingly ads, both made for the web and for TV, attempt to do just that.

Witness the Super Bowl advertisers, on the hook to the tune of $100,000 a second for time in the big game, increasingly gear their campaigns to live on on YouTube after its over. Or, take Evian's "Live Young" aka the "rollerskating babies," which never appeared on TV but have been passed around and watched more than 71 million times over the past year. The beauty of what works on the web is that there are no hard and fast rules. Ad Age picked some of the best of the recent best with a big hat tip to our sister pub, Creativity. It's true that YouTube sells ads. But it's also true YouTube has made advertising better. Take a look.

Michael Learmonth, Advertising Age, and Ann Diaz, Creativity

More than a year ago we launched our very own YouTube channel www.youtube.com/advertise. At launch, the channel's primary focus was to show brands not only how we were able to manage and communicate our own business brand within the YouTube platform, but also to explore and showcase the tools available for them to plan and create meaningful campaigns on our site.

Over the past year, YouTube's advertising platform has continued to integrate into Google's robust advertising system, AdWords. With ad format innovations such as Promoted Videos and more robust targeting of YouTube through the placement targeting tool, we realized that more and more AdWords customers were successfully advertising on YouTube through a familiar channel and interface.

As our business has evolved and inquiries from potential customers have grown, we recognized that it would be helpful to create a destination where small and medium businesses could learn how to engage their customers within the YouTube environment. For these reasons, we're announcing a new site at www.google.com/ads/youtube.

Here you will learn about the tools available to advertise on YouTube through the AdWords interface and how other AdWords customers are already having success meeting their marketing objectives on YouTube through AdWords. So check it out!

Posted by Michael Rucker, Product Marketing Manager

With Advertising Week less than a month away, we're excited to announce that voting for the YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands is now open. This competition puts the industry's finest -- musically speaking -- in the spotlight for a chance to be known as advertising's rock 'n' roll kingpins.

Last September, McCann Erickson brought down the house and took home the coveted trophy. Who will emerge as this year's champion? Wunderman with their rendition of AC/DC's "Live Wire"? Lowe NY's version of The Kinks's "You Really Got Me"? It's up to you!

RCKBAND, from Digitas, with their own take on a-ha's "Take on Me"

An independent committee from the Association of Music Producers (AMP) has narrowed the field down to 8-10 bands and singers (see official rules and regulations on Advertising Week's site), and your votes will decide which entrants make it to the finals.

So vote for your favorite act on the official Advertising Week YouTube channel until September 7. The bands with the most votes will live out their rock fantasies at YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands at the Highline Ballroom on September 22 in New York.

Posted by Kristin Kovner, Industry Marketing Manager

Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner, directors of Custom Communication, are the engines behind YouTube Brandwatch, a bookmark-worthy blog about how companies use YouTube and the effects those videos -- and the conversations surrounding them -- have on brands.

1. Why did you create the blog?

The blog grew out of a feature that we created for Social Media Influence, the conference and site we run. [Slate's] The Big Money liked the concept and invited us to turn the feature into a weekly blog/column.

2. What is Brandwatch's mission?

Brands spend millions each year managing their reputations and promoting their products using traditional media -- advertising and PR. However, the majority of major brands remain tone-deaf to the power and influence of a medium like YouTube despite the fact that it has a community of millions that interacts with it on a daily basis. The irony is that brands are having great difficulty getting consumers to sit through their 30-second spots on television while on YouTube vibrant communities have formed to discuss every creative detail that goes into the making of these ads. Advertisers ignore this feedback at their peril.

3. What generalizations can you make about the impact of online video on brands?

Online video about brands and the commentary that accompanies it is visceral and insightful into real people's perception of a brand (even if you have to wade through a lot of inane comments to get there). For the brands themselves, there's this very recent sensation that YouTube has become too important to ignore...never mind the the lack of control they have over how customers refer to them. From the poll results, it's evident that the public wants brands to be as sophisticated as they are. In other words, brands should be more daring and more creative with their advertising messages, and they should spare us the obvious gags.

4. What is the best use of online video by a brand to date, in your opinion?

Different brands use YouTube to great effect. For a small company like Blendtec, YouTube offered this amazing opportunity to tell an "extreme" narrative through video content. For a huge brand like T-Mobile, the "Dance" series of videos (which were accompanied by a TV advert and an advertising campaign on YouTube) offered an opportunity to show the online public that it understood how people like to share and celebrate common experiences. That said, we still have a soft spot for the "Where the Hell Is Matt?" videos...enabled by Cadbury's Stride Gum. We also like the brilliant editing in a longish, but much beloved video produced for the niche brand, Inspired Bicycles, that has amassed over 9 million viewers since April.

5. What do you think marketers don't get right often enough when it comes to using YouTube?

The marketers that use YouTube to the greatest effect are the ones who build it into their marketing strategy beforehand. It's exceedingly difficult to convey a compelling, entertaining, informative message in 30 seconds for a TV public with a limited attention span. On YouTube, marketers are now uploading the extended versions of their TV spots to provide the fuller story and to invite the public into a discourse. In effect, they want to know, "tell us what you think." That said, many marketers are still missing a big trick with this medium. They are putting the videos up, but providing so little detail about how it's made, who's in it, what's that music playing in the background. For now, the YouTube community is going in and filling in these holes in the detail, but we rarely hear from the marketers again after they post the ad. In effect, they are abandoning their most attentive followers. With our YouTube Brandwatch column, we're aiming to remind brands that we can have this conversation with or without your input.