Monday, February 4, 2008

How to Embed a YouTube Video in PowerPoint 2007

I wanted to show a YouTube video in my class. The easy way to do this, is to save the URL of the YouTube video, click on it, start the browser and watch the video.

However, I wanted to make it slightly more elegant and embed the video directly into the slide.

The first thing that we need to do, is to enable the insertion of Flash objects in PowerPoint. The instructions are here, but I repeat them below
  1. Open PowerPoint and create a slide.
  2. Click the Microsoft Office Button Button image, and then click PowerPoint Options.
  3. Click Popular, and then under Top options for working with PowerPoint, select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box, and then click OK.
  4. On the Developer tab, in the Controls group, click More Controls Button image.
  5. In the (long!) list of controls, click Shockwave Flash Object, click OK, and then drag on the slide to draw the control.
  6. Right-click the Shockwave Flash Object, and then click Properties.
  7. On the Alphabetic tab, click the Movie property.
  8. In the value column enter the URL of the Flash object, which you can get as follows:
  • Take the canonical form of a YouTube URL, e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBX0Jfr62Kc
  • Transform the URL into http://www.youtube.com/v/QBX0Jfr62Kc
  • Enter this URL as the value of the Movie property.
And here is the resulting PowerPoint slide.

Just in case you were wondering why I wanted this particular video in my class: This is part of a viral campaign built by Honda for the Honda Element car, back in 2006. The goal was to make the Honda Element car relevant to keywords that are inexpensive to bid on. (In this case "funny commercials" that had a cost of $0.10 or so.) The target keywords were queries submitted frequently by users in the target demographic (young males, just graduated from college), so that Honda could attract attention to the new car, without competing for keywords like "car," "honda," "suv" that were going for $2-$3 per click. Great idea, and great commercials. Take a look at the ad below and click on the related ads to see more ads from the campaign.