Unfortunately, many vendors in the marketplace have begun to offer a menu of what I call video ad sausage - a mix-mash of low quality ad units being packaged as pre-roll.

The simplest example of video ad sausage is running video and a companion banner jointly withing a 300×250 display unit and calling it pre-roll. In order to get to the bottom of this, let’s start with the proper defintion of Pre-roll:

Pre-roll - A video ad that plays before the start of a video that a user has selected to play shown prior to the user’s selected content starting to play.

Companion Banner - A banner ad that is displayed simultaneously with a video ad, often remaining on the web page after the video ad is complete.

There are a few important ingredients of pre-roll that media buyers must understand in order to avoid getting a plate of video ad sausage.

• User Initiated - if the units loads automatically, without a user selection, it is not pre-roll
• User Selected Content - if the user has no idea what video content is behind the ad, it is not pre-roll
• Companion Banner - if the companion banner is served within the same unit as the video ad, it is not a companion banner

To be more explicit, running auto-start, sound off video ads in 300×250 display inventory is clearly a violation of the definition of pre-roll. Even worse, is running the companion banner also in the same 300×250, thereby not only reducing the value of the pre-roll but also double counting impressions. These tactics are a clear disservice to both agencies and their clients.

To learn more about true pre-roll, talk to your local BrightRoll contact.

Based on the success of recent campaigns for Liberty Mutual and National Geographic, and months of product development and testing, BrightRoll will be providing video rich media services to clients for free. See our press release or Emily Steel’s article in the Wall Street Journal (free | paid).

We believe video advertisers will maximize the value of their advertising budgets by spending money only on the creative assets and media inventory. Adding an rich media additional vendor into the process complicates execution, limits distribution and costs a significant percentage of the overall budget.

Put simply, the only people getting rich off of rich media are the vendors.

A few years ago, rich media vendors emerged to help agencies take static banner assets and make them more exciting, more engaging and, hopefully (but rarely), higher performing. However, video creative assets costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to create and are already exciting, engaging and high performing.

Online video advertisers are different. They need the industry’s best video ad units and video distribution technologies, coupled with creative custom skins and branding elements, to maximize their video ad budgets.

Now advertisers can execute their video campaigns efficiently and in their entirety, with BrightRoll. In-stream and in-banner video advertising distribution on the largest branded and only transparent video ad network.

If you would like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We look forward to serving you and clients.

We continue to be focused building online video advertising solutions that are more impactful (bigger and higher quality), more effective (higher engagement and click through rate) and highly scalable (reaches over 65% of the BrightRoll network).

We are excited that this new ad unit delivers on all fronts and is a true innovation in the video ad category. In addition, the response to this new ad unit has been overwhelmingly positive. We have already signed up multiple advertisers in the entertainment and technology verticals, and we are expecting HD ads to represent at least 10% of our business this calendar year.

It is clear that innovations involving high quality and HD video, which impact file size and therefore streaming costs, will likely not come from the high volume video sites which typically drive video innovation. This is because most high volume video sites have yet to generate a profit and streaming higher quality or HD video files simply accelerates an upside down business model.

On the contrary, our business model is based on delivering an increasing amount of value for our advertising clients on every ad we serve, so our incentive is to deliver the best quality experience that is technically possible. This is the most recent step in our efforts to add additional value to the online video advertising process for advertisers and agencies, and we are looking forward to additional announcements coming soon.

Here is screenshot of the ad unit:

Here is some of the press on the announcement:

CNET
TVWeek
MediaPost
Mashable
NewTeeVee
Webware

This is a horrendous outcome for all parties involved. Clients miss key marketing opportunities in the most important marketing period of the year, agencies miss their targets which is a disservice to their clients and tv networks miss out on significant revenue opportunities.

Additionally, this problem is only going to get worse. The writer’s strike has negatively impacted television content quality and ratings, but the real hit in both categories has yet to come. Many shows have strung along previously filmed content but are about to reach the end of that rope. If money is flowing back to agencies this quarter, expect a large chunk to be searching for a new home in Q1.

Fortunately, not all media channels are struggling. At BrightRoll, our video inventory is growing in both quality and quantity. We have significant Q4 and Q1 inventory available for broadcast buyers who have budgets previously allocated to under performing television placements.

Although we expect advertising dollars to follow their audience online regardless - sometimes it takes a shock to the system to accelerate the adoption.

We hope this new site does a better job explaining who we are, what we do, how we do it and who we do it with.  As with every site launch, we are anxious to hear feedback from users / visitors, so please feel free to drop us a note.

The site was designed by Bill Tani, of Tani Design,  and the technical / video work was done by the amazing BrightRoll engineering team.  Videos were sourced from proprietary BrightRoll video campaigns or from Revostock, which is the best stock video provider in the country.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24 /PRNewswire/ — BrightRoll, Inc., the world’s
largest video advertising network, announced today that it has served its
one billionth advertisement less than six months since hitting the
half-a-billion mark. BrightRoll helps leading agencies, representing brands
such as Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard and Sony Pictures, launch and scale video
campaigns across the industry’s leading publishers. Since the company
launched in July 2006, BrightRoll has expanded its reach to provide
execution capabilities across over half of the top 100 online media
properties in the United States. The one-billionth video advertisement was
served on September 27, 2007 for Zenith Optimedia, Hewlett-Packard’s
advertising agency.

The campaign, for Hewlett-Packard printers, features Gwen Stefani
elaborating on her creativity and the creative process. BrightRoll helped
Zenith Optimedia execute the Hewlett-Packard campaign across a portfolio of
stellar publishers such as CBS, Clear Channel Radio, CNN and ESPN.

“BrightRoll has been a huge asset to the online video planning and
buying process for Zenith Optimedia and Hewlett-Packard,” said Miranda
Molen, media supervisor at Zenith Optimedia. “They streamlined the creative
production process, improved media efficiency and provided strategic
metrics analysis. Put simply, their knowledge of the digital video
landscape and ability to execute campaigns is unrivaled.”

“Video advertising is an important new category of online marketing and
we are excited to work with national brands and premier publishers to
unleash the incredible opportunities it represents,” said Tod Sacerdoti,
CEO, Brightroll. “BrightRoll’s growth is further evidence that scalable and
trusted solutions exist in the marketplace today and that online video
advertising has officially arrived.”

BrightRoll executes video campaigns on hundreds of publisher sites,
including more than 50% of the top 100 online media properties in the
United States. The average BrightRoll video campaign reaches over 50
million unique users over a six week period. A video advertising innovator,
BrightRoll is built entirely on proprietary video ad serving, targeting and
optimization technology.

About BrightRoll

BrightRoll is the world’s largest and most trusted video advertising
network, having served more than 1 billion advertisements in 12 months.
BrightRoll helps major brands and agencies execute “smart video ad
campaigns” across the industry’s leading publishers, including over half of
the top 100 online media properties in the United States. BrightRoll’s
proprietary campaign execution, inventory management and advertising
delivery technology provide brands and agencies with the reach, frequency
and scalability needed to achieve their campaign goals. BrightRoll is a
privately held, venture- backed company and holds its headquarters in San
Francisco, CA. BrightRoll offers its service at http://www.brightroll.com.

When comparing these numbers to ComScore’s own video impression data, the vulnerability of search as the core online advertising medium becomes instantly clear. ComScore shows 7B U.S. video impressions in March, 8.3B in May, and 9.1B in July.

So, what does this mean?

1. U.S. video impressions will pass core search impressions in the next three months
2. U.S. video impressions will pass expanded search (meaning including Amazon, eBay, etc.) in the next twelve months.
3. Video advertising spend is being underestimated by analysts (eMarketer currently estimates video will grow from 10% to 25% of search revenue, and from 5% to 12% of total online ad spend, over the next five years)

As with all audience shifts, such as network television to cable television or television to the Internet, ad dollars will follow the audience. However, it does take time, as the network to cable transition took 5+ years and we are still in the midst of the spend movement from television to the Internet.

My bet? I estimate that video advertising will be 50% of search revenue within the next five years and will be larger than the entire search advertising business in the next ten years.

Note: If you include rich media banner units that include video in these statistics, you will find that there are both significantly more video impressions and video ad spend than currently being reported.

Amazon Links is a Wordpress Plugin for adding relevant and contextual links to Amazon.com products. It generates code automatically and allows full customization of how and when contextual links appear within your content.

Rather than placing banner of Adsense advertisements around your site, Amazon Links opens up new, contextual inventory within the content of your site. Essentially, this allows you to profit from the traffic of your blog without negatively impacting the user experience.

Additionally, users benefit from a direct link to products relevant to your content. For example, if you write an article about a great book that you read, a compelling movie you saw or an amazing new product you used, Amazon Links provides a direct link to that product on Amazon.com so your users can explore the product further.

If you want to make money off your content, consider installing Amazon Links Pro. The Pro version allows additional customization, such as adding your Amazon Associates ID so you can directly profit from people that click on the links and buy products from Amazon.com.

Basic (Official Page) - Amazon Links Basic for WordPress 2.1+
Pro (Official Page) - Amazon Links Pro for WordPress 2.1+

Complete Features List

• Full support for Amazon Associates IDs. For more info about the Amazon Associates Program, visit their site.
• Customization supported:
  • Link style
  • Preview display
    • Border Color
    • Background Color
    • Details Text Color
    • Link Color
    • Amazon Price Color
    • Amazon Text Color
  • Context Link Settings
    • Exact Product Name Match
    • Open Link in New Window
  • Inclusion or Exclusion of Product Categories
• Supports the following countries:
  • United States
  • Great Britain
  • Germany
  • Japan
  • France
  • Canada
• Works with WordPress 2.1+

Installation

Installing should be a piece of cake and take fewer than five minutes.

1. Upload amazon-links-pro.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Sit back and wait for your content to be crawled
4. Within 30 minutes, contextual links will appear on your site

Screenshots:

Download:

Amazon Links Pro for WordPress 2.1+ (zip file)

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider for this killer blogging software, and I am happy to finally be contributing to the effort.

I am excited to be co-chairing the host committee for Macy’s Passport Fashion Show. The fashion show is a charity event that raises money for AIDS research and is one of my favorite events of the year.

Tickets include an opening party with appetizers, the full fashion show and the after-party with the models at SLIDE. The pre-party includes local cuisine and cocktails, and music spun by DJ Donovan. The fashion show features collections including Calvin Klein, Marc Ecko, Levi’s, Calvin Klein Underwear and much more. The post-party is at SLIDE with resident DJs Solomon and Chris Clause

Macy’s Passport Opening Night
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Fort Mason Center, Festival Pavilion
6:00 pm Pre-Party
8:00 pm Show
11:00 pm Post-Party

Invitation - http://www1.macys.com/campaign/passport/index.jsp
Buy Tickets - http://www.ticketmaster.com/artist/834445
See Who’s Coming - http://www.socializr.com/event/513086233

Featured Collections will include Calvin Klein, Via Spiga, Marc Ecko, Epic Threads, Levi’s, Academy of Art and Calvin Klein Underwear. This spectacular show will conclude with an epic silver finale with one of a kind pieces from world class designers.

Hosted by: Auren Hoffman, Brendan Coen, Christina Spaulding, DJ Donovan, Don Davis, Elizabeth Johnson, George Karpaty, Irene Hernandez-Feiks, Jessica Mullens, Jonathan Abrams, Kim Wilsey, Kirsten Bartok, Letitia Kim, Lucy Jacobs, Michael Kim, Missy Cohan, Nate Valentine, Nina Oestlien, Rebecca Sacerdoti, Rob Bailey, Todd Palmerton, Tod Sacerdoti, Trevor Hewitt, Zaw Thet

Here are some of my favorite business books:

• Hiring The Best - Martin Yate
• Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
• Made in America - Sam Walton
• Trading Up - Michael Silverstein
• The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki
• Moneyball - Michael Lewis
• Multiple Streams of Income - Robert Allen
• Running Money - Andy Kessler

I promise to post more books soon and I will let you know how the Amazon contextual link performs.