Video advertising is the fastest growing advertising format online, so says a new survey from BrightRoll—one of the largest online video advertising networks.  The pace of growth for online video ad spending is expected to remain around 40% for 2010—the same rate of growth as 2009.

A full 94% of advertising executives plan more spending in 2010 for online video ads than ever before.  In the previous year’s survey, that number was 87%.  (Christopher covered this entire report in great detail about a week ago.)

So why are agencies moving so hard and fast to online video ads?  Well, why do ad agencies keep doing anything?  Because it’s working.   More than 50% of respondents said video was the most effective form of advertising—heck, 83% said they were getting more value for their dollar than just one year ago.

That’s pretty significant.  Do you remember even one or two years ago how much talk there was about advertisers not feeling like they get the most for their money with online ads?  How much less they were willing to spend versus traditional television commercial spending?  All that talk now looks more like empty speculation with each passing month.

Part of the reason for advertisers flocking to online video in great numbers is a turnaround in one key area:  targeting.  For years, online video’s inability to accurately target viewers with ads based on demographic information was its Achilles’ heel.  But in the past year, the online video industry has regained the agencies’ trust by turning that particular lemon into very tasty lemonade—agencies now see the targeting capabilities of online video to be its greatest asset.

No one wants to throw away money on ad impressions with audiences that weren’t going to be customers anyway.  The more that online video can demonstrate their ability to accurately match users with videos that appeal to them, the more advertisers are going to jump in with both feet.  It’s the confidence that your ad will be seen by people in your actual target audience, instead of just any old viewer.

The BrightRoll conclusions shouldn’t really be surprising to us.  We already know viewers are willing to tolerate more ads than they’re being served.  And now we have ad agencies that have gone from skeptic to convert in 12 months and are now trumpeting the effectiveness of online video ads.

And according to new reports from Bloomberg, the number of advertisers on YouTube videos has increased tenfold in just the past year.  This is exactly what I like to see… separate sources confirming each others’ conclusions.  The YouTube data on advertiser growth serves to underline and add exclamation points to the BrightRoll survey.   So even if you want to take issue with the survey sampling size or parameters (which I have been known to do myself), the fact that we have two separate data sources offering a glimpse at the same general conclusion is comforting.  I think we can safely say that ad spending for online video is on the rise, and will continue to rise.

Part of this is because video itself is on the rise.  Don’t forget the recent news that YouTube viewers watch nearly 100 videos each on a monthly basis—meaning they’re watching more videos than ever.  I mean, some portion of this growth in online video ads is simply an attempt by advertisers to be wherever the audience is. But there’s one thing I feel pretty confident in declaring about ad agencies—they don’t like to throw money away.  They’re measured on their performance.  And if they see themselves increasing spending for online video ads in the coming year, then it’s because they have the backend data that proves (at least to them) that it’s working… that they can create revenue for their clients via video ads.

So does this mean we can expect to see YouTube turn profitable soon?  Is it a foregone conclusion?  Of course it is.  They’ve increased advertisers by 1000% in one year, and advertisers are bullish about the future of online video ads.  Someday, probably sooner than we think, YouTube will post a harmless footnote on their blog saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re profitable now.”  Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they already are profitable and just aren’t telling us yet.

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On the heels of Apple’s news that it’s sold 1 million iPads in the first 28 days of release, I bring you insight from “The Long Tail“ author Chris Anderson on why (they can now track your activity online and offline). This week’s New Media Minute also features key insight for Web creators from the Writers Guild of America on how to win sponsorships and a quick overview of two emerging new media startups, Coincident TV and AlphaBird.

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Making money from Twitter have since been the objective for some companies and IZEA seems to hit the bull’s eye when they launched Sponsored Tweets, an advertising platform in Aug.

The platform works by giving the advertisers the ability to create campaigns and select, invite, approve tweeples of their chosing to participate in their sponsored campaigns. On the other hand, the tweeples are able to set their own pay rate and find opportunities to tweet about the brand and get paid either through pay-per-tweet or clicks.

As a Tweeple

There are alot of checks and filter built into the platform and as a Tweeple, you can define almost everything about your tweeting ways and the offers you are interested in. For instance, you can set your charge per click, charge per tweet, your content demographic (are your tweets to all or a segment of the audience), add keywords and define your notification settings.

With the information you provide, Sponsored Tweet will come up with Twitter related metrics and show them to advertisers with the profile of your tweeting behavior. The advertisers might also take into account your reach, Twitter Grade and even past sponsored tweet behaviors.

As an Advertiser

As an advertisers, you are given insights to the members and campaigns. You are also able to see who tweet your offers, set a minimum followers count and ratio (eg. following : followers), set the minimum costs, opt for premium tweeples and even invite individual tweeples to promote your campaign.

Your campaigns will have a specific disclosure clauses and you can either write your own ad copy or have your tweeples write it for you with your approval. Once your campaign is launch, you can track the overall performance and see specific tweeple’s results.

Is It Good For Twitter and Social Media At Large?

We have seen it before, sponsored blog posts and now sponsored tweets. It has always been a debate whether this form of advertising is both ethical and sound. Here is the problem, anytime you lend your voice to a paid ad campaign, you also put your credibility on the line – for a cheque. If more and more people starting getting paid to tweet, the whole social media sphere will be full of advertisers trying to reach the people with ‘sponsored whatever’.

While IZEA said that their disclosure system will be “systematically enforced”, I wonder if these tweets will devalued if the author is being paid to write it. What do you think?

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This is a follow up on my previous post ‘70% Trust Recommendations Posted Online‘. In that post, I wrote about a study conducted by Nielsen on how social media have influence trust on consumers through recommendations posted online. In this post, we will look at how social media influence trust in advertising.

This chart is a survey done in April 2009 to track the changes in the level of trust in advertising since April 2007. As you can see, 2009 shows an increase across the board except in the newspaper industry. Now what could have happen to them in the last 2 years? Nielsen offered an explanation:

“it’s possible that the CGM (consumer generated media) revolution has forced advertisers to use a more realistic form of messaging that is grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the lofty ideals of the advertisers.”

That shows that ‘strangers’ recommendations carry exactly the same or even more weight than the company’s website itself. That can be a glass half empty or half full depending on which social fence you sit on.

Once again, it proves that a brand risk being force out of business if they neglect have a presence on the social web and here is why:

• For brands not engaged in the social conversations with their target audience, they stand to lose out on literal world of opinion, market research, feedback and customer service opportunities
• Brands that only use traditional marketing will still need to be transparent and honest because consumers now can log on to the social web and find out about the truth from ‘complete strangers’.
• Brands that value the opinions and suggestions from the consumers and display them on the website have the most to gain because by demonstrating complete transparency, the brand build trust. Look at Skittles for an example of the most extreme form of aggregated consumer opinions. Visit Crispin, Porter + Bogusky Beta website for a more sedate version.

Please share with us about what influence your opinion about a product, brand or service online? Would you publish your thoughts about a particular brand on social networking sites or your blog? Have any brands that you publish your opinions about contacted you thus far?

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It has always been a debate on how Twitter is going to monetize the site and it seems like there are some baby steps taken in the form of “sponsored definition”. It’s so subtle that unless you have sharp eyes, you won’t notice the difference (Seth Simonds has been talking about this since June 23rd).

However, you won’t be able to always see the sponsored definitions as it’s always integrated with Twitter definitions that are simply informational and helpful.

According to blog.twitter.com, it looks like Federated Media is handling the Twitter sponsored definition. “It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you’re a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they’ll fix you up right.”

Twitter to Come

Seth Simonds mention that the future of Twitter ads will be a proper 185px X 185px on  top of the profile. In fact, you can already see some ads appearing if you go to setting and change the language preference to Japanese.

It’s very interesting to monitor how Twitter is going to monetize their site, do you know of other ways Twitter is monetizing their site beside advertising?

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Using banner ads for your online marketing campaign can be an effective and inexpensive way to get increased exposure for your site. Like other form of online marketing, you need to test and track everything that you do with the banner ads. This article will teach you some some techniques to increase your web traffic using banner ads.

First, don’t just advertise your website in a general way. Don’t talk about what your company does and how do it is. Instead, prmote a certain product or services. The likely hood of readers purchasing your product is higher than those who have to find your product after clicking to your website.

Next is to make sure that your banner is simple in the message but dynamic in the design. Animation will attract more eye balls than the static ones. The color of the banner is also important. If the colors are bright and loud, it will do better than bland normal ones. Also make sure that you keep the size of the graphic small. If the size is too big it will result in slower download time and most people will just move on instead of waiting for the site to finish loading.

Finally, place ads at the top of the page so that is easier to be notice when the page load. That way, you will get more attention than the ones place right at the bottom of the page which need to be scroll to in order to see it.

Using banner ads can be an effective and inexpensive way to get increased exposure for your site if you follow these tips.

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Here are top 10 reasons why you should let someone else sell your advertising for you. You can be a webmaster or a blogger, it doesn’t matter.

#1 You can blog more – Spend more time blogging, building relationship with readers and driving traffic.

#2 You don’t have to deal with constant questions about your ad rates.

#3 You don’t have to invoice customers – Get rid of the paperwork and administration you hate.

#4 You can just sit back each month and collect a check – Isn’t that what you wanted?

#5 You don’t have to worry about ad management software, running campaigns, putting up ads, tracking impressions and clicks.

#6 You don’t have to listen to advertisers complain about results or poor performance. – Leave that up to your ad sale person.

#7 The sales reps can usually get a higher dollar value than you can. Because , that’s what they are trained to do.

#8 The sales reps have more contacts then you do. Top sales reps have a big rolodex of leads they can call on.

#9 They can take care of all your inbound requests and respond to them for you.

#10 Again, you can focus on what you do best, blogging.

So, are you ready to look for sales rep? You can find them online too.

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