But I know a few of you digital marketing and online video lovers are RSSing this blog quietely. And I need your help. I’m drafting a really interesting piece that compares online-video promotion (not prerolls or overlays, but contextual stuff) to traditional online advertising. This is a follow-up to my manic post about proving online video can sell.

I’ve got a few online-video campaigns (entertaining videos by webstars) yielding views for as low as a nickel. This isn’t preroll or invideo… this is host-endorsed, digital storytelling, entertaining content. That seems unbeatable by another other online-advertising medium. Impressions are dirt cheap, but eye charts show that the vast majority of impressions go unseen. And at best we glance. Maybe .014 percent of us click the ad (unless it’s a rich media ad, where Pointroll claims 3-5 percent).

Here’s my question:

• Who’s got REAL standards on the engagement level of a CPM buy. How much waste is there? I can find all the “horray” reports easily by Dynamic Logic and Insight. I need eMarketer, Forrester or credible numbers for comparison. All I have now is .014 click-thru for flat ads and 3-5 for rich media. What about percent that actually see the ads? What about time?
• How do you compare these impressions to a hosted endorsement in the context of the show? What’s it worth when Jimmy Kimmel pimps a product? I think about $300K. When I watch Film Riot (a Revision3 show that is going to explode), the guys do a playful Netflix spot in the middle. It’s tucked between segments and I’d never skip it. It’s as entertaining as the show, and I’ll bet Netflix is getting that for a steal.
• Realize I can’t yet do a pre/post and test/control study, which will show that recall, intent and purchase for Film Riot’s spot will be exponentially more effective than even the most expensive CPM. I just need to give media buyers an apples to oranges comparison so they understand that this type of advertising will give them DEPTH to complement the reach of other advertising.
• Don’t tell me I’m comparing apples to oranges, because I know. I just need to show it’s as good as other online-advertising options because otherwise the media buyer will never experiment.

BTW- you’ll love this. A recent Hitviews campaign promoting a destination site showed a greater than 6 percent click thru rate from the videos about the site. SIX PERCENT. That means if we did nickel views, the site was getting qualified traffic for 30-60 cents. By my estimates, that would cost $5-$50 per visitor through display, and search really wouldn’t have worked as well for an entertainment site (or company intent on branding).

I’ve always been enchanted by improv comics, and was especially intrigued by a former co-worker (Melissa Katz, where are you?). She worked in corporate communication, and said her improv comedy experience helped her in her life and job. For some similar thoughts, see this recent post by Kevin O’Neil about how improv and life are similar.

Here are some of the tips we picked up last night by our instructor, Jonathon Gabrus.

• Listen don’t plan. If you’re planning a direction, you could end up contradicting.
• Go with the flow. We played a “yes, and” game where you repeated your teammate’s statement, then added “and” and added to it. The two people need to move the bit in the same direction, and when someone said “but” you could feel that breakdown.
• Questions force your partner to be clever, so they’re generally avoided.

I’m jazzed that nobody knows I do stuff on YouTube because I wouldn’t want them to think that means I’m funny. But I’m going to have to mention it, because I’m in a class full of brilliantly funny people that HAVE to be in a video. I’m tempted to ask a few of my favorites to stay late after the next class and ROFL on the sidewalks of NYC (literally) to see the reactions of strangers.

Oh- did I mention I’m probably the oldest guy in the class by a decade. Time for a hair transplant.

For some reason advertisers and marketers thought this functionality was already possible, but there were only two ways to create hyperlink overlays until now: a) a video owner could use an “annotation” to drive traffic to another YouTube page, or b) an advertiser could by Google Adsense cost-per-click or CPM ads (which appeared in the bottom 5th of video).

This new offering is really a “value-ad” to stimulate video owners to buy more of the undersold “promoted” videos, whereby the video owner pays YouTube a bid price (ranging from a penny to fifty cents) per click. Each time someone searches “prank,” I bid 1-5 cents per click. Like Google, it’s a low click-thru rate but I don’t pay unless they click. Chances are as a partner I’ll never make back the penny, but I’m experimenting to see how brands could benefit from this.

Again- here’s the criteria for this new offering, which is not being communicated well.

• First, you can’t use it if you’re a video owner or partner who isn’t buying cost-per-click ads to promote your own videos.
• Second, you can’t use this if you don’t own the video.
• You need to both OWN the video and be running pay-per-click ads to promote it.

Example- if you search “Nalts” on YouTube and you see my Garbage Can prank video, then you should see the text overlay ad (although it’s not working now, presumably because it’s being run through editorial approval). I’m not clear as to whether this prevents me from monitizing the video via InVideo ads or adsense ads.

TechCrunch reports this feature helped a charity raise $10K in one day. This could improve video’s ability to drive traffic, a primary objective for many advertisers. For instance, I spoke with a client in the travel industry yesterday that was not impressed with “impressions” and awareness, but on direct response. Could his digital advertising be linked to selling rooms?

Unfortunately, most campaigns have a very small click-thru rate (in my experience 2-3 percent is healthy). I worked on a recent promotion for a major network’s web property, and saw a healthy 6% rate (the percent of viewers that visited the destination site). But imagine if it was easier to find the link (instead of buried in the description tab, where the viewer must select “more” before even seeing the hyperlink.

So What, Nalts… How Do I make Stinking Amount of Money Using This?

Want to make some quick cash while the rest of the industry gets hip to this? This should work well temporarily because YouTube is the 2nd most-popular search engine after Google, and most advertisers aren’t exploiting it yet. You’re at a distinct advantage if you buy keywords on YouTube and have a video thumbnail (instead of a text ad) as a resulting ad, and you’re probably not facing the bid competition you might on Google for the same terms. So go forth and make money using these tips, and thank Uncle Nalts later.

1. Create a destination website packed with some relevant information related to a sought-after area (like electronics, lawsuits, mortgages), and soak it with Google Adsense advertisements that yield high pay-per-clicks.
2. Create videos about the topic, and encourage people to visit your website for important information. Keep the video SUPER short or you’ve lost ‘em.
3. Post your videos, then bid on YouTube keywords  via YouTube ads so people find your videos. Tag them well so you hopefully get some organic views too.
4. Be sure your bid price is not more than you’ll make back (cap it at 1-5 cents and 5 bucks per day initially). If you spend 50 cents to get them on your video, and only migrate 10 percent, then you’ll need to make $5 per visitor to break even. But if you bid a nickel and migrate 20 percent, you have a decent margin as long as people click some of your Adsense ads.
5. Now your “target” will hopefully convert well in three phases:

• from a YouTube search to your video (at a low price)
• from your video to your own publisher website (hopefully 10-20% of them)
• from your website to the websites paying high cost-per-clicks to publishers (at a higher income to you than you paid YouTube).

Oh by the way- this isn’t sustainable. Eventually people will bid up the keyword prices on YouTube making the delta less significant. And in general it’s hard to justify paying for ads when your model is ad dependent.

More information:

• The YouTube blog visitors are not impressed. They’re still petitioning YouTube to keep the “old” channel pages (see comments).
• Check out the YouTube advertiser and partner “business” blog.
• But here’s where you go to start a campaign (YouTube ads).

And then there’s “music chairs,” which shows all of the churn of top digital-media executives.

Among them, HowSociable is interesting because it gives you a free “score” that helps you compare your brands’ online activity relative to competitors. This, and more robust paid services, give brands a way to benchmark and show performance over time.

So now I’m thinking of a parody video that replicates the EMR rushing Jackson to the hospital. Grainy footage of the ambulance and paramedics screaming away paparazzi. Naturally we don’t see Jackson’s face because that’s logistically difficult, and would certainly be a HIPAA violation. One EMR gets a cell call from TMZ editor Harvey Levin, who promises $10,000 for first-hand status updates but $25,000 for news of Michael Jackson’s death. The other paramedic shrugs, and pinches the IV line, which flatlines the King of Pop. “Should we say a prayer or something?” asks the ethics-devoid EMR. 

There are at least 3 things that will probably stop me from actually shooting this bit. First, it’s already late as viral satires go. Second, I’ll need to convince a friend to let me use an actual ambulance, and that has some risks if the video was to travel. Thirdly, it’s somewhat dark and tasteless… even if the satire is not at the expense of Jackson but on the ethical implications of paying sources. Levin reports that he doesn’t pay nurses or police, but he did provide quotes that suggest a paramedic might have been the source.

Can someone charged with saving a life be “under the table” incentivized to provide details of a celebrity death? That’s pretty frightening, and if I was a hospital I’d do some serious digging.

Here’s some actual footage obtained by Hollwood.com of the ambulance exterior (as precious time is wasted trying to backup the ambulance). But what happened inside? The world may never know…

Here’s a list of social-media monitoring tools and services that JD Beebe put together: The New Anti-Social: Free Ways to Track and Trend Online (and a Few Ways to Pay, too). A lot of these allow you to track ala Yahoo Buzz what’s hot. But few allow precise trend info on niche words, or show brand sentiment over time (envision a chart that showed Domino’s reputation pre and post booger sandwich).

Below are some free ones, since the Visible Measures and Nielsen Buzzmetrics are not inexpensive. Between the higher end services and these below, I’d add Vocus. This is a service I recently discovered that offers some cool tools for monitoring online and offline, and the company owns PRWeb so it has a lot of vehicles to contact journalists by segment. 

1. Trendrr.com: Easily create new tracking trends on a myriad of platforms. Easily track trends of Facebook Application use, Craigslist jobs, last.fm stats, google news, amazon/ebay products, google search results, twitter results, flickr and friendfeed stats, Facebook EVENT tracking, tons of video sites tracking, and some compete.com analysis.
2. http://www.google.com/trends: Use keywords to track Google Search queries throughout time, check stories on a timeline and see geographically where the buzz is coming from. Simply adding Google Analytics to our site will increase this information (also free).
3. http://blogpulse.com/trend: BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to create graphs that visually track “buzz” over time for certain key words, phrases or links. Compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others.
4. http://technorati.com/chart/: Technorati Tracking. Technorati charts allow you to visualize the impact an individual tag has on the Blogosphere by graphing the number of times the tag occurs in blog posts across the web. You can build a chart to graph one tag or compare up to five tags at once. Once you are satisfied with a chart, add it as a widget on your own blog.
5. If you’re interested in tracking Twitter, there are more tools out there than humans actively using Twitter. Go get ‘em.

Although I was recently a Product Director, most of my career has been focused at digital marketing. So when I bought traditional media, I deferred significantly to our company’s media buyer specialist and our buying agency. I pretended to understand the cost for reach and frequency, but the reality is that my eyes glazed over at promises of awareness levels and GRPs. They were meaningless excel sheets with large numbers that meant little to me. I just didn’t care. All I wanted to do was ensure that a dollar spent yielded a few dollars back in profit.

So when I read Jim Louderback’s article about web video advertising and CPMs of $100 and content creators paying 25 cents per view, I developed instant symptoms of pre-menopause.

We lamented at the current state of online video buying like the only two people at a Grateful Dead show that weren’t spinning in circles and seeing Abraham Lincoln in trees.

Louderback, CEO of Revision3, told me about his thoughts on Microsoft Vista’s obsession with reach and frequency, and how little it did to move product. Put less kindly, he says Microsoft murdered Vista buy buying broadly instead of targeted (I’d argue the engineers deserve some credit for that debacle).

At the risk of offending a media buyer, let me speak as a marketer… whose money you are trusted to spend wisely. You dazzle and confuse me. You tell me I’m getting great reach and recall but I don’t care. I think you’re really attractive, but I know you’re excited about a property because the rep took you to lunch last week. I just want to know that my revenue increases in excess of my spend (hopefully 3-5 times as much). So when you’re making a buy on the brand’s behalf, please consider impact more than reach. Reach and even targeting can’t move product without impact.

In the case of online video, why would anyone sponsor a show for a dime unless it had a good reason it could sell at least 30-50 cents of product? Why would someone pay for a view unless that view could sell a product? There are countless studies that show that banners are not seen, so I’d need to be proven otherwise before even a stupid 50-cent CPM buy made sense. The InVideo ads have been proven to work (Dynamic Logic) better than preroll or banners (download IAB report), but that depends on the creative and how immune we get to them (do you honestly think this click-thru data from last year is true today?). Most importantly, it depends on when the ad is served since most never finish a video (TubeMogul), and our eyes hover around the close button like Doctor Evil on the laser button.

But if the video content itself includes the brand – like Coke does with American Idol — it’s quite hard to miss. There’s also an implied endorsement because Simon, Paula and Randy are drinking Coke rather than Coke boasting about itself. That’s where the brands need to be unless our ads are as delightful as a Pixar film and we have audiences glued to seats.

Okay- I’m getting off my soap box now, and leaving you with Uncle Nalts’ 4 steps (and they’re using alliteration so even the thickest media buyer will remember it) . These are the tasks of everyone vested in the success of online-video, which will be driven in the foreseeable future by advertising not consumer micro-payments. Who has had success? Who’s ready to share? Who is ready to get answers? Believe me, this is a “rising tide floats all boat” initiative. We can do our quiet case studies that says we’re better than the next guy, or we can demonstrate collectively to brands and media buyers that this medium is the most accountable one since paid search. This is perhaps more vital than the radical shift of consumers from broadcast “lean back” to online-video “lean forward.”

Seriously- it won’t matter if online-video represents 4, 10 or 20% of video consumption in 2010 if we can’t prove it can compel a purchase! eMarketer will have to change its estimates on ad spending if we cooperate.

1) Educate: A CPM is NOT a CPM. Comparing apples to apple-flavored Halloween candy from 2004. I’m writing a piece for iMediaConnections about this. Simply put, a letter from a friend is going to have more impact than junk mail… even if they both arrive via the mailbox. Video ads and host-sponsored content are both delivered via video, but that’s where the differences end.

2) Relate: Use offline analogies. I love the Vista example. I’m not suggesting Coke bag advertising, but I have to believe there’s more value in the Coke green room than the DVR-blocked ad.

3) Substantiate: Someone has to survey video watchers, to understand — at the moment from their perspective — what ads impact them most: an ignored banner or a trusted star/show with a good placement. If you’ve done it, I doubt the media buyers know.

4) Calculate: the Holy Grail is to show via test/control or pre/post (Dynamic Logic, Comscore, Insight) that contextual and relevant video messaging is worth exponentially more than wrap-around banners or existing IAB standards (see IAB report for best practices) . It’s intuitive, but data will make a media-buyer’s life easier… so they know that an impression isn’t an impression unless it makes an impression (I just coined that, so don’t forget to copyright me). Now you can get back to lunch with the media properties.