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Silk bows brand channel 'first' on YouTube

This month, Silk Soy Milk is looking to bust up people's (sometimes weird) perceptions of soy milk with a new campaign using the latest in interactive media elements.

With creative by Leo Burnett and media by Starcom Mediavest Group, Silk Soy Milk embarked this week on a media campaign that includes both a new YouTube brand channel product and a QR code-enabled print buy with Metro commuter newspaper.

The hub of the four-week campaign is a branded YouTube channel featuring a new "deep link annotation" functionality that is a first for YouTube worldwide. The channel is fully branded and skinned with Silk creative, and the deep-link annotations mean the channel users stays within the Silk branded environment as they play the game in the video window.

The creative theme for the campaign is "Bust it or believe it," and viewers are encouraged to "bust" or "believe" facts like "Are bananas going extinct?" The goal was to poke fun at some of the more outrageous beliefs that people have about soy milk, while engaging them with the product at the same time, Katie Musgrave, account supervisor, Leo Burnett, told MiC.

Silk also took advantage of another new YouTube product, promoted video, that launched Oct. 14. Promoted videos are coded with keywords, selected by the advertiser, to make them more discoverable by users as they search in YouTube and are monteized like Google Adwords on a cost-per-click basis.

The media buy includes online banners and several initiatives with Metro. QR codes were embedded into Silk ads in the paper - they're the first Metro advertisers to do so - and users who activate the code with their phones can find out if the fact presented is true (believe) or false (bust). Silk also sponsored a branded channel on the Metro Viigo app and bought full mobile sponsorship of the news pages on Metro mobile site.

"The whole goal here was to use new an innovative technology to engage the consumer," Robin Hassan, digital director, Starcom Mediavest Group, told MiC. "Ultimately what we're looking for is people that are already health-conscious and realize that the right nutritional choices make a difference in how they feel. They're willing to try new things but are not yet totally convinced of soy."

www.youtube.com/silkcanada

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