LisaNova's Video Greeting

After an initially cool reaction to amateur video auteurs, Coca-Cola is continuing its embrace of consumer creativity with a YouTube promotion that taps several of the site's most popular video bloggers, reports AdWeek.

Coca-Cola's Holiday WishCast, its first promotion with YouTube, invites users to create and submit video holiday greetings to friends via email using video greeting cards from six of the site's most popular video bloggers, including LisaNova, Geriatric1927 and Renetto.

The campaign is not the first to tap YouTube stars. Young & Rubicam recruited popular video bloggers, including Renetto and Lonelygirl15, to make clips for World Poverty Day in October. It is the first time YouTube has brokered an ad deal that uses content from its top users, who will be paid an undisclosed fee for their participation.

The promotion is part of a turnaround for Coke regarding consumer-generated media. At first it pooh-poohed a popular viral video showing the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment yielding explosive results. Then, while Mentos capitalized on the video's popularity with a YouTube contest, Coke turned Coke.com into its own site for consumer-generated media. But two months ago Coke linked up with the Diet Coke-Mentos video creators to run a contest on Coke.com to attract videos of new experiments.