The 2013 New Year’s greetings, from the French advertising and public relations company Publicis Groupe by their CEO Maurice Lévy is making multiple appearances in my circles

v. clever use of youtube – try pausing, fast forwarding, or viewing full screen: youtube.com/user/PublicisG… rather meta.

— George Siemens (@gsiemens) December 13, 2012

When I saw it my immediate thought was how did they do it? In the official press release they say:

It’s just one of the many very human interpretations of the standard YouTube functionality taken for granted today.

Looking for YouTube player functionality left me scratching my head. Looking at the source gave a big clue:

… basically the entire video area including title and controls is an embedded iframe. This allows Publicis Groupe to create their own Flash based player with custom functionality for pause, play etc.

To get the iframe into their YouTube channel they used YouTube’s Custom tab settings which are available on Branded Channels.

Simple but very effective.

Last updated by Martin Hawksey at December 13, 2012.