For example, if you are in the chocolate business we can target people who have typed in chocolate into Google. We can also target people who have searched for desserts, or wine or other luxury type of items. We can also create a short video of either :15 or :30 seconds and put in different offers. We can also test different landing pages on your chocolate website we can send them to.

In the example below we are testing a drug rehab video to determine if the inventory in Youtube is any different than the typical Google Adwords search networks and content networks. We probably won’t be replacing those networks anytime soon, however, we may certainly augment it and reallocate some dollars towards the Instream or PreRoll Ads. Let us know what you think. We can start testing this for as little as $500 per month and target a specific city or state.

Call Jim Peake if you have any questions at 781-990-8844

So lets first start with search engine optimization. When I first built a blog called SpeechRep.com I only wanted a site that allowed me to write simple posts and comment on others work. It does just that. Simple stuff. Then I wanted to rank for a simple keyword phrase “Internet Marketing Consultant.” I made a feeble attempt to do that knowing full well I did not care if I did or not, and all the while knowing exactly what I had to do to rank for it. The reason I bring this up is I got a call the other day. Tim Pipher of Major League Video said he was perusing the web and found me by typing in “internet marketing consultant.”

What is interesting about this is I potentially did not find a customer, but a supplier using SEO. Cost = $0.00 and a hour plus of simple SEO and maybe a few links from some articles I wrote. It gets more interesting. Tim has a company called South Eastern Studios. These guys have spent a small fortune building a studio with all of the special effects and hi-def camera equipment and on air talent. So at the end of the day you can get a super high quality video for less than a $1,000 bucks for a minutes or less. People do business with people they know like and trust, online video does a great job at communicating this.

What can this do for you? It can even the playing field with your competitors as a small business competing with players with bigger budgets. Tim is going to drive the profits out of many typical DRTV production studios and other studios competing for the same advertising dollars. What will make Tim’s business fly or not are the business processes he has in place to actually produce the videos or the direct response commercials. He is going to have to do volume and have smooth production processes to make this all work profitably.

In this brilliant article The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky he surmises what the media executives are thinking, “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.” I think the last sentence is a pure cultural thinking problem and should read, “And we won’t do that.” Every blogger and Twitter user is in some way giving Rupert Murdoch a run for his money. While some of might not pay for “journalism,” my question is do we need to pay for journalism? And is what we were being force-fed on i.e. TV News and the Newspapers “journalism” at all? The guy who sent the Tweet of the US Air plane in the Hudson published “news.” Does that make him a “journalist? Hell no, but do we need a professional journalist to then spin the “story” dozens of different ways and then call it “news,” and is that worth paying for? Maybe not.

So if the media can’t get the advertisers to pay the “old cheap” prices they were charging, guess what? More of “the news” will move into the studio and be manufactured infotainment in my view.

Now advertisers have two options, pay “the new cheap” rates and pay “the new cheap” production rates and create their own channels and create their own “online media” with Tim and Southeastern Studios.

O.K. online video is big we all know that and we have all heard of Hulu if you are in the industry. These guys at BrightRoll are serving more video than Hulu. Go figure. I would expect these guys or someone like them to get reeled in by a Google or a Microsoft in the not too distant future.

Their 57 slide presentation might seem like a lot and I almost ditched it but it goes super fast, so check it out. It might be interesting to me to check out some of their remnant inventory to test.

What is a video ad? It is also known as a “pre-roll” an ad before the video starts or a “mid-roll” an ad that plays in the middle. I saw Buisiness Insider do this and it was super annoying. Check out one of their videos.

To take a look at the other top 10 online video ad networks in the space check out this link on Mashable. It is interesting to see how some of these highly generic technology companies do as well as they do while at the same time creating a brand new category.

With over 3 Billion Monthly searches YouTube is easily the second biggest search engine, behind Google. Imagine 20 hours of content being uploaded every minute of every day to YouTube? That’s a lot of “stuff.” But like Greg Jarboe says paraphrasing Yogi Berra “no-one likes to eat there any more because it is too crowded,” couldn’t be more off base. He shares a few tips on how to get noticed but at the end of the day this is an awareness video of how big the opportunity is you all of us if we use YouTube and Online Video correctly.

If this is so then it is not surprising that Google sees growth in online video ads, that’s because most of us have high speec ocnnections that make viewing of video enjoyable.

About two years ago I took back my Cable Box to Comcast. I found myself gravitating more towards the “news stations” and felt that there was more out there and chose to spend more time in books and on the internet for my information consumption. I think where both these guys will trump the old business models is in a la carte offerings. For example, I had no intention of watching Barack Obamas speech on why we need to add more troops in Afghanistan, but I would have paid $1.50 to watch a hockey game or something on the Discovery Channel.

However the current offerings have so many channels that are of zero relevance to me that I have turned it off all together. I find that many of the folks I know watch very little TV. There are way too many options now other than TV.

Notice how they are NOT selling a darn thing.

He has expressed surprise to the quality of the videos being produced for Youtube which also include advertising. My son brought home a Rubrik’s Cube and I wanted to learn the secret on how to solve this little game and sure enough there are plenty of Youtube videos on how to do it…..thank goodness! Frankly it appears that Youtube will probably surpass the cable companies in “quality content” very shortly if they haven’t already.