YouTube has launched its YouTube Sponsored Videos advertising program. Like Google Ads but with featured video. And guess what! To promote the program YouTube is using…YouTube! Practicing what it preaches. (Sort of reminds me of a little initiative at an ad agency that started six months ago.)

Back in July, we at the Intergalactic Post-Advertising HQ wrote about an OfficeMax back-to-school campaign that went viral just before classes started. Turns out "Penny Pranks" was part of the beta release of YouTube Sponsored Videos. So YouTube did a case study of OfficeMax's success, made a video about it and put it on the internet. Where videos belong.

Mmm. We in the post-advertising age like a good story, especially one about the success of digital media and narrative advertising. The spot here tells the tale of a brand—one that didn't want to spend a lot of money and didn't have a lot of time—that created a powerful campaign founded in social media. It's a love story between a brand and an agency. It follows a simple formula: creative + YouTube = growth. And it acknowledges that the more valuable the media, the more it will spread.

Then they all lived happily ever after.