(Cross-posted from the Agency Ads Solutions Blog)

When you're a company that has been around for more than a century, you've not only been doing something right, but you also have the pressure to maintain that reputation. Enter Embarq, a telecommunications provider which started out in 1899 as the Brown Telephone Company, and continues to offer its services to customers across 18 states. How was Embarq able to continue sharing its innovations with customers and remain a strong brand in an increasingly competitive landscape? Enter YouTube.

Embarq employed a number of strategies on YouTube, including targeted display ads and a YouTube Brand Channel, and developed a video contest in partnership with the digital marketing agency iCrossing. These tactics resulted in increased viewership of its how-to videos, positive brand references on forums and blogs, and strong sales of its high-speed Internet service with the lowest cost-per-order of any campaign run during that timeframe. According to Zena Weist, manager of interactive brand strategy for Embarq:

“The results not only showed us how effective YouTube is as a marketing platform, but it also showed us what content really resonates with our audience."

How can you also find success with brand advertising on YouTube?

1. Be where users are: advertise on YouTube. You can promote your clients' video content using YouTube Promoted Videos, which shows ads based on keyword searches. You can also directly target specific pages where you know the customers will be using text, video and image ads. The Placement Tool can help you find the right sites and easily upload them to your clients' accounts.

2. Centralize communication strategy with a YouTube channel. All users may create channels for free. Using a YouTube channel, clients can centralize video content and educate and communicate with customers in a single location. If you think your clients qualify, you may also consider creating a YouTube Brand Channel like Embarq.

3. Engage users with a contest. Contests are an effective way to engage users with your brand and increase opportunities for viral marketing. Paid advertisers may be able to run contests through the official YouTube "Contests" section.

Posted by Stephanie Kong, Tech Comm Marketing

As you may have seen from this blog post, our new channel design is coming out of beta and will now be the default option for all new channels. We wanted to let you avid readers of Biz Blog know how brand channels will be affected.

If you already have a brand channel, you can switch over to the new design by clicking on the "Upgrade my channel!" link on your Channel Design page. Some channel owners have opted into the new design already (nalts, LisaNova, sxephil, The White House, and University of Phoenix). For now you will be able to revert back to your old design very simply, but please note that we will be automatically transferring all brand channels over to the new design on July 29th 2009.

We will be keeping almost all existing features of brand channels, but we feel the new design offers a better channel experience for viewers, with the new "video navigator" providing an interactive watch experience where your users can browse through and watch multiple videos without leaving the channel. It also helps channel owners customize their channels in a simple manner, choosing exactly which videos and playlists to present to visitors. Finally, as users will spend more time watching videos on channels, we want to make sure that our content partners are able to run advertising against their videos whether on the watch page or on a channel.

Once your channel is transferred, most elements (including gadgets, if you have them) will be ported across automatically. If you have a customized background image, it may need to be re-uploaded and re-arranged to fit the new layout, and some custom colors may need to be tweaked. Please also note that all background images will now be hosted by YouTube and that we have increased the file size to 1MB.

Posted by Brian Glick, Product Manager