Big brands doing product placement in YouTube videos

Interactive web video series let you choose your own adventure by clicking annotations or “call for actions” at the end of the videos. In other words, you get to participate and decide what will happen. It’s definitely a cool concept and a fun way to get your viewers to interact with your videos.

Big brands have been pretty slow to start sponsoring web video series’, but recently AXE made a deal with Chad (Villela), Matt (Bettinelli-Olpin) and Rob (Polonsky), pretty much the godfathers of interactive web video series, on YouTube, which was really a pioneering move for AXE in the online advertising/marketing niche.

Titled the Teleporter, the video has already gained 350,000 videos, and only features the world-famous deodorants seconds before the video ends. Rob stated in a TubeFilter interview that they wanted to keep product integration at a minimum as audiences usually don’t like it very much and can be quite sensitive about it.  Axe respects their stance, and let them do what they felt was best, which is fantastic to see a big brand trust a small video producer so much – and of course, it’s also smart, since the video producer is going to know best what will or won’t work with their audience.

This shows that brands are slowly but surely developing a greater understanding of how brand promotion works on YouTube. And for YouTubers, brand promotion of course doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re selling out, as long as you don’t execute those videos in a “cheap fashion” and make sure to keep the brands from being intrusive.

I’ve done a few promoted videos, like the ones I did for Big Skinny Wallet and Vumber and they both worked quite well for me.  They gave me some additional income and allowed me to do some creative things with my videos.

Doing branded videos not only can get you additional income but also gain more exposure so when done right it can be a win win situation.  Have you experimented with any branded videos yourself?

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