New Google Ads: Gmail Theater

There’s a unique video campaign for Gmail running on The Wall Street Journal (ClickZ first noticed it yesterday). Introduced by “Kai, one of the engineers behind Gmail,” the ads spin a handful of geeky-cute tales that use puppets made from office supplies to convey the e-mail platform’s key features. One interesting thing about the WSJ placement is how it’s hosted and tracked. While the unit does have some nice rich media features, including the ability to cycle through several ads and scroll through tips, it’s fundamentally a YouTube-enabled widget. That means the videos are publicly hosted on YouTube, and can also be shared or embedded elsewhere on the Web. It’s ad trafficking made transparent to the user.

Update: Amit Agarwal wrote in to clarify that this is an AdSense unit. Amit’s blog, Digital Inspiration, has a screen grab and notes the YouTube player is 250×200 pixels and is embedded in an AdSense unit that’s 300×250 pixels.

RSS readers: click through to see the video.