Earlier this month, Cadbury Australia transformed YouTube with a new campaign that threw out the traditional rectangular video player and made it round. The video player transformation is part of a “Ready to roll” campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Rollpack, rolled out in collaboration with Saatchi & Saatchi Australia. The round videos were featured on Australian YouTube at the beginning of the month and have been causing a stir ever since.

Cadbury’s custom round YouTube player is the first of its kind. Though it is not fully functional like the traditional YouTube player, viewers have the option to pause and play, as well as to mute and unmute the volume. Commenting is also not enabled on the round videos, although Cadbury has included a few comments from Facebook users for atmosphere and viewers can feel free to write their comments in the Channel Comments field. Unfortunately, embedding is not enabled for these videos, but you can watch them on Cadbury Australia’s YouTube page.

Saatchi & Saatchi Australia discussed the campaign earlier this month with Campaign Brief. The company’s ECD, Steve Back, said, “This idea was about offering people a quick, unexpected moment of joy in a unique space.” Digital creative director Peter Galmes said, “We want to reach people I places they are already choosing to spend their time. With over two billion videos viewed per day, YouTube was the natural choice.”

Cadbury Australia and Saatchi & Saatchi worked closely with Google in the early stages of their campaign in order to plan and create the custom round player. Special content was created to fit into the new round player, including a hamster running on a wheel, a guy in a dog suit running on a wheel, and a parrot that is awesome at basketball. Check the videos out here and let us know what you think. Do you think Cadbury’s campaign was a success, breaking out of the box and going round? Do you think we’ll be seeing more campaigns like this in the future?