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YouTube's Looking More Corporate

Wall Street Journal (registration required), Wednesday, January 17, 2007 12 PM

Facing an audience easily turned off by hard-sell advertising, YouTube is trying to do for itself what it has done for many other brands: Sell itself. The site has been making a serious effort to cash in on its popularity, first by hiring its a chief marketing officer and now devoting a spot on its home page to an advertiser video.

Some marketing professional are beginning to say that YouTube's efforts to seamlessly integrate advertising are looking a little too corporate. Coca-Cola sponsored holiday greetings that users could send to friends, Adidas bought a dedicated channel to showcase videos related to its brand, and now General Motors is running a two-minute spot for Cadillac. YouTube's CMO Sally Reider has plans for developing standards for a new generation of advertising.

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