Subscribers of Mountain Dew‘s YouTube channel may have noticed something unusual happened to the thumbnails in their subscriber feed starting on November 3, 2014. The online video destination of the PepsiCo-owned softdrink brand uploaded several action-packed videos promoting the opportunity to earn in game credits on specially marked bottles of Dew (and bags of Doritos, which is also owned by PepsiCo), as part of its brand partnership with the very recently released video game title Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
However, the drink that once tickled your innards didn’t limit the brand campaign to a single video. Mountain Dew and Call of Duty executed a YouTube channel takeover unlike any we’ve seen to date. The beverage replaced all the thumbnails on its channel page, creating a Call of Duty mosaic featuring one of the in-game soldiers prepped for battle.
Mountain Dew, of course, isn’t the first major brand to redesign its channel page for fun and marketing. Nintendo set the bar very high way back in 2008, with its ‘Wario: Shake it’ integration. The campaign literally shook the game’s channel page to mimic in-game action and caused Nintendo’s home on YouTube to fall apart in a very cool way. The Expendables, Samsung, Tipp-Ex, and Cadbury are among other entities that followed suit and released similar efforts to varying degrees of viewer enjoyment and success. However, the Mountain Dew initiative is the first to utilize YouTube’s pre-existing layout (instead of a heavily customized player or landing page) to turn its channel from a regular-looking YouTube page into very cleverly branded YouTube page takeover.
As for Call of Duty, the Mountain Dew campaign is just one of the very many initiatives you can currently find on YouTube in promotion of the Advanced Warfare release. The franchise is, after all, one of the best-selling of all-time, so it shouldn’t be hard to spot other videos (both branded and user-generated) on the world’s largest video sharing site (and beyond, too).
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