The most popular video site in the planet has just launched a new ad format, currently available in the U.K., France, Italy, Canada, Germany, Spain and The Netherlands– YouTube Promoted Videos. The new ad format allows for advertisers to choose, through the AdWords interface, a promoted video ad template so that when a YouTube viewer clicks on your promotion, they see your video. You only pay when people click to see your video – not when people see your promotion.

The YouTube Promoted Video ad option consists of a thumbnail on the left and three lines of text on the right. When a user clicks on a video ad, he/she will be taken to the YouTube page or channel with the video. Any user can promote ads on YouTube for just a few dollars a day, though most of the promotions on the site are run by larger organizations.

According to Nielsen, online video streaming is growing slowly but surely. This September, total video streams increased 24.8% compared to 11.2 billion streams in the same period last year. YouTube in particular leads over 50% of all video streams in the U.S., a total of 6.7 billion streams.

Just like sponsored links on Google, advertisers will be able to pay for their Promoted Video when users click on the ad. In addition, advertisers will also be able to add a ‘call-to-action’ clickable overlay on videos to engage people and drive them to their websites.

Watch the YouTube Promoted Video presentation:

Apart from Michael Jackson’s death and the Iranian elections, two news stories that greatly increased total time spent for online video in the month of June, July continued to prove to be a strong month with 21.4 billion videos viewed during the month.

According to comScore Video Metrix, 158 million US Internet users watched videos in July, it’s an audience record hit. In addition, the duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes and the average viewer watched about 500 minutes of video.

Also in July, Google websites ranked as the top U.S. video property with 8.9 billion videos viewed, while YouTube accounted for more than 99% of all videos viewed.

Here are some more facts from the comScore research:

- 120.3 million viewers watched 8.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (74.1 videos per viewer)
- 48.2 million viewers watched 518.6 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer)
- The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, totaling 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer
- The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes

What do these results tell us? Well, for starters, these are all positive signs for the online video industry. Both the quality and amount of content being uploaded online is greatly increasing as well as the audience watching it.

Moreover, trends show that people are accessing the internet more and more while the average time spend watching TV is declining. In fact, Microsoft predicts that internet consumption is set to overtake TV by 2010 as the most used form of media.

It is very important for advertisers and marketers to take these predictions and statistics into consideration and brainstorm on any alternative strategy in which the two (TV/online videos) can converge in order to take advantage of both consumer audiences.

And most importantly, don’t forget to optimize your online videos for YouTube or any other website to achieve a good position on the search results!

It is very important to keep in mind that as social media is changing the way business, internally and externally, is conducted, it is not only important to listen to the on-going, multi -faceted conversations of your customers’ demands while interacting closely with them, but it is also fundamental that external parties, such as partners and stakeholders, are up-to-the-minute with your communication strategies.

In order to achieve this, Dimensione Danza, with the support of 77, has created a corporate video that clearly plots out the trends and social media tools the brand has adopted as part of their marketing strategy in order to keep everyone aligned with the company’s objectives.

The video was entirely conceived by 77, the rendering and post-production was done by Paolo Corsaro, founder of Zeroinquadro, a company that specializes in the production of  corporate and viral videos.

Marco Corsaro, 77Agency Managing Director has affirmed that:

“developing this video was an interesting and great opportunity to demonstrate what new media can represent for companies and the potential that leveraging social media can have on businesses today. It was also a good opportunity to bring together the talents of 77 and Zeroinquadro. We hope we will be able to repeat this experience with many other of our customers”

The project was conceived solely to communicate in a simple and effective way the latest trends and Web channels Dimensione Danza has decided to use for the implementation of their online promotional activities.

The video is not yet available to the public, however, click here to view the article featured on DailyNet.

Flip your computer upside-down or maybe follow these instructions:

Wondered what life was like in the southern hemisphere?  Now you know.

President Obama has once again decided to turn to the Internet to reach his people, only this time the White House is using the online approach to run a Q&A experiment that will go live on the White House’s official website tomorrow.

The idea, as explained by President Obama, is to open up the White House to Americans as much as possible so that people know what’s going on at all times. And in today’s economic turmoil it’s only natural citizens feel worried, have increased fear for the uncertain and are particularly keen on knowing how the world’s strongest economic power will go about putting things back on track.

Using the Web to bring everyone together is the main focus in this experiment. Obama is inviting everyone to go into whitehouse.gov under the feature ‘Open for Questions’ and submit questions about the economy or vote on other people’s submissions.

So far, 14,450 people have submitted 17,419 questions and casted 538,210 votes (these numbers keep changing by the second).

How will the White House determine which is the most important submission(s) out of all?  The Google Moderator: a tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences and Q&A sessions will be the indicator of the most relevant questions President Obama will be discussing during the live online session from Town Hall tomorrow.

The top question so far is: “As a student, who like so many others works full time and attends school full time, only to break even at the end of the month. What is the government doing to make higher education more affordable for lower and middle class families?”

Tomorrow, don’t forget to tune into ‘Open for Questions’ to watch President Obama answer the most important submissions live at whitehouse.gov.

What exactly would you say to someone who’s about to come into the world in times like these? Such spot couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time especially considering today’s widespread pessimism, and who better than Coca-Cola, an undisputed advertising leader in the market, to inspire us all.

The objective of the new campaign is to reinforce optimism, happiness and closeness all of which are usually conveyed in Coca-Cola’s advertising.

“The economic situation is quite complicated, so it is important that brands like Coca-Cola can inspire people,” said Marcos de Quinto, CEO Coca-Cola Spain.

The dialogue in the spot starts off by introducing Josep, a 102 year old man from Mayorca, a region in Spain, who explains how lucky he is to be alive at 102 and still be able to share with his friends and family.

His aim is to fly to Madrid and meet Aitana, who’s only a few hours from being born, in order to explain to her the beauty of life and to always make sure she seeks hapiness in everything she does, despite the bad things that life may bring along (making specific reference to the current world crisis).

His las remark in the commercial goes something like:  ‘don’t let yourself be carried away by small things, for you will only remember the good ones. When you grow up to be like me, you will realize that the one aspect you didn’t like about your life is the fact that it is too short’.

Josep was able to deliver his message to baby Aitana during their ‘encounter’, just minutes after her birth, and expressed to her, face-to-face, that she should, by all means, enjoy life.

Enjoy:

The realism of such commercial is one that has touched millions and millions of people around the world. McCann is planning to make the spot in different languages as to diffuse the ‘Enjoy Life’ message to the entire world population.

“What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create Thru YOU. In other words, what you see- is what you hear.”

This is how Kutiman, Israeli web producer, presents his one-of-a-kind music album to the entire YouTube viewership and now, Internet universe. This is a true example of what the Internet is all about or at least it gives you an idea that there are absolutely no limits in the Web.

This phenomenal project gathers many disparate parts of videos, both image and audio, mashing them up without pitch-correction– into truly enjoyable, groovy tunes.

What’s more impressive is that since its launch it gathered over a million views and generated tons of buzz on the blogosphere and Twitter creating a massive snowball effect that even caused the hosting website to crash due to high traffic.

ThruYou contains 7 impressive tracks that range from R&B and Funk to Reggae and Jazz, all made by dicing, splicing and editing tons of YouTube music videos including instrument and a capella recordings.

As the Huffington Post puts it “we no longer passively consume media, we actively participate in it.”

A great example is and will always be, Obama’s monumental online campaign which clearly showed how people are gaining more and more power while both participation and interaction in the social media landscape continue to increase tremendously. The Internet is open to everyone, it’s up to the people to make the best out of it and use it favorably.

It’s a new technology that allows website publishers, advertisers and creative agencies to enrich new or existent video content into becoming incredibly interactive in order to drive more sales and leads.

Coull Engage makes more of existing videos or you can design your media campaigns from scratch and give e-commerce a whole new meaning. Coull makes your videos as interactive as you want them to be by making as many products or characters clickable so you can get the best out of your advertising.

According to Coull, an engagement rate for interactive video ads of 29% was observed in some leading brand’s campaigns which have adopted the Coull video technology. Some of the starring brands include MSN, Renault, Bebo and Lycos.

Take a look at the Nike ACG video below as a sample interactive video that uses Coull:

As you can see, each item of clothing and accessory featured in the video has been assigned its own tag (marked with brackets).  Users can click on the product of their choice and a separate window pops up with the featured product, containing the product description and call-to-action. A further click will then take you straight to the product page on the brand’s actual site, in this case, the Nike Store.

The Coull Dashboard provides you with a real-time monitoring, tracking and measuring of your ads performance where you can create, upload, modify and set parameters to your video.

If exploited correctly, Coull could be a great affiliate marketing tool. It’s also a great product placement tool for brands to engage with the right target audience, hence drive sales to your website.

Regardless of where your video campaign is placed- websites, microsites, social network profiles-  Coull will always embed the tracking and reporting options that enable you to keep track of your online campaign at all times.

The pseudo young media platform that has been causing quite alot of buzz- also Start-Up of the Year at LeWeb ‘08, same at the Plugg European Web 2.0 and runner up at the Twiistup event taking place tomorrow in LA-, Viewdle, is being recognized internationally for attaining a numerous of significant milestones during its short life due to its revolutionary video search technology.

Viewdle’s technology is currently being used by Reuters, (what better endorsement)- its video search technology recognizes people’s faces on screen. While we’ve only been used to video search based on keywords related to the title of the video or the text around it, Viewdle actually sees the videos and better yet, recognizes the person in the video.

Reuters is using it along with their videos news inventory which allows users to search within their catalogue for a specific person. “Our goal at Reuters Labs is to proactively identify emerging technologies that add value to our trusted news offerings and keep Reuters at the forefront of the evolution of digital media,” said Nic Fulton, chief scientist at Reuters.

The platform serves for indexing videos frame-by-frame (55 frames per second) and create a “real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.”

Video content owners who use Viewdle will be able to extract metadata not through text-based indexing but instead directly from news, videos and entertainment shows, in real-time, will maximizing the relevancy, usage and monetization of the video content.

According to Reuters, Viewdle is the new way to search, no more waiting for download or buffering to check the relevancy of returned results, no more irrelevant search results.

Check out the Viewdle Facebook Application!

Is YouTube’s new venture going to bring in the cash for Google?

The leading user-generated site is signing a deal with William Morris Agency which represents actors such as Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. The idea behind such deal is to allow YouTube to play a significant role for the agency while putting its hands on more professional content.

On the other hand, the agency and actors would benefit from this deal by getting an ownership stake in the videos they produce for the website plus massive distribution of the content that the agency by itself could never accomplish.

Hosting videos starring top A-list Hollywood actors could really boost YouTube’s reputation as the next-generation video entertainment source and perhaps get the cashier to start ringing everything up.

As reported by comScore, YouTube received 100,000 million visitors this past October. The downside to this is that the website can only profit from those ads placed by companies like CBS or Universal Music and not ads within content uploaded by random users.

YouTube is really shooting for stardom with this deal. It will become a hub for Hollywood stars and superior video content, which somewhat reflects a similar effort to the webcasted YouTube Live 2008 this past November .

However, how exactly does Google intend to pay all these A-list artists and agency after struggling to monetize the video-sharing website?