ITZ Publishing

40+ Apps & Tools To Customize Your Facebook Pages

First published on http://www.hongkiat.com. Read the original post here:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/apps-tools-to-customize-facebook-pages/

By Cameron Chapman Filed in Web 2.0

Facebook now has over 800 million active users around the world. If it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world (right behind China and India), and more than twice the size of the United States.

So it’s pretty much vital for anyone trying to promote a product, service, event, or cause to create a Facebook page. While other social networks (Google+ among them) are making gains, Facebook is still the largest and most popular out there, and that’s unlikely to change in the immediate future (and besides, Google+ doesn’t even allow brand pages yet).

One of the biggest mistakes brands make when creating Facebook pages is to just use the default tabs and default content. They post nothing but self-promotional updates and have no realy ways of interacting with their fans. Basically, their pages are boring.

The answer to this common problem is to make use of all the custom content applications and tabs available for Facebook pages. You can add custom welcome tabs, video tabs, feed your blog or other RSS feed into your news feed, import your tweets, and a lot more. Finding the apps to do all this, though, is a bit trickier.

In this guide, we’ll show you some of the best apps for Facebook pages and how to best use them. While it would be impossible to cover every app available (there are thousands that can be used on pages), this post will get you started.

More related posts:

• Customizing Business’s Facebook Fan Page
• 20 Facebook Tips and Tricks
• Creative Facebook Timeline covers
• Integrate Facebook Open Graph With WordPress

 

Customizable Tabs

Creating completely custom tabs is the bread-and-butter of Facebook Pages. These apps make it easy to create completely custom tabs for just about anything.

First Impression

First Impression is North Social’s landing page app. The CMS built into the app makes it easy to create, edit, and update the page. It also includes the ability to customize the image and message that get posted when someone shares you page. Pricing for North Social apps is based on the number of fans you have (less than 1,000 fans is only $19.99 per month) and all accounts come with a 14 day free trial.

Welcome Tab

Welcome Tab is Involver’s landing page app. It makes it simple to create a custom branded splash page for your FB Page that invites visitors to become fans.

TabMaker

TabMaker is a free tool for creating custom tabs for your Page. You can create pages in a WYSIWYG editor, making it accessible for non-tech-savvy users. There are additional apps you can add to your tabs, both free and paid.

Social Candy

Social Candy offers content management and marketing tools for creating and managing professional, customized Facebook Pages, with no technical skills required. Subscriptions start at $29.99 per month, though you can try Social Candy for free.

ShortStack

ShortStack lets you create a number of specialized tabs for your Page, including fan-only content, sweepstakes and contests, custom contact forms, and more. They offer a number of widgets for adding functionality to your pages, including Flickr, images, voting, polls, virtual gifts, countdowns, iFrames, videos, and more. Their free account can handle Pages with up to 2,000 fans, and paid plans start at $15 per month.

Tabsite

TabSite is a fan page platform that lets you easily customize your Facebook page. It uses widgets to let you customize the content that appears on your custom tabs. Widgets available include everything from images and text content to YouTube channels, RSS feeds, and contact forms. They offer a free plan with up to 2 tabs per fan page, advertising in the footer, and a limited number of widgets. Paid subscriptions start at $5 per month, and there’s also a full white label option available.

Lujure Social Suite

The Lujure Social Suite offers a number of widgets and apps for customizing your fan page, including iFrames, YouTube, PayPal, Google Maps, Countdowns, Twitter, Live Chat, Tumblr, Real Estate, Skype, Vimeo, and more. Their free plan allows one tab and access to all the applications. Paid plans start at $30 per month and include all the applications, plus an unlimited number of pages and tabs.

Fan Page Engine

Fan Page Engine makes it really simple and easy to design your own custom tabs. They have a drag and drop interface for creating pages, offer “reveal” tabs (fan gates) to increase likes to your page, and they have help videos to guide you in creating your own tabs. Their Basic subscription starts at just $4.97 per month.

Video Players and Tabs

There are a ton of video players and tabs for Facebook pages out there, so we’ll only cover a few of them. If the ones below don’t do what you need, you can rest assured that there probably is an app out there somewhere that does, you’ll just have to do a bit more research.

YouTube Tab

The YouTube Tab, from TabFusion, lets you easily add a YouTube tab to your fan pages. While it’s not free, pricing is a reasonable $10 per year. It’s a very versatile tab that can be easily customized to fit your needs, and is already used by a number of high-profile brands, including DC Shoes, Nissan Japan, and Peugeot.

Video Channel

Video Channel from North Social lets you add and organize YouTube video content directly. You can customize the tab header, add a fan gate so visitors have to like your page prior to watching video content, commenting is optional on videos, and there’s management options for sharing. It requires a North Social subscription, which starts at $19.99 per month.

Video Premiere

Video Premiere is another video tab app from North Social that is focused on showcasing the release of new video by displaying a single large format YouTube video on your page. It includes fan gate functionality, a customizable header, sharing management, and optional on-page comments. It requires a North Social subscription, which starts at $19.99 per month.

Best YouTube Channel for Pages

Best YouTube Channel for Pages lets you display playlists or your channel and will show up to fifty of your most recent videos. The app is reasonably priced at $9.99.

Hubnut

Hubnut is a widget directly from Vimeo. Just create your Hubnut with your Vimeo videos and then paste the code it gives you into any custom tab that allows HTML.

Blip.tv Tab

Blip.tv Tab is another app from TabFusion. This one lets you includes your Blip.tv videos on your Facebook Page. The background image and text colors can be customized, and the app is only $10 for the year.

Vimeo Tab

Vimeo Tab is also from TabFusion. It only works with Vimeo Plus accounts, and includes all your videos and channels. The background and text colors of the app are customizable. Vimeo Tab is $10 for the year.

Contests

Running a contest on your FB page can greatly increase the number of fans you have if you run the contest well and get the word out. There are a number of apps that can help you run a contest or sweepstakes. It’s important to be very careful when running a Facebook promotion or contest, as it’s vital that you adhere to Facebook’s rules, or risk having your page deleted without warning. This is why using a third-party application can be a good idea, as they make sure everything is set up according to Facebook’s rules.

Votigo

Votigo offers a number of contest and promotion apps for your page, including photo and video contests, and a viral sweepstakes app. Both apps are still in beta, and are currently very inexpensive, at only a couple of cents per month.

ContextOptional Contest

ContextOptional offers a Contest app for adding a contest to your page. You can add photo contests, video contests, and essay contests (or a combination of the three) to your page, with the ability for fans to upload their own content and where fans can vote on entries.

ContextOptional Sweepstakes

ContextOptional also offers a Sweepstakes app, which gives you complete control over the design of your sweepstakes tab. You can gate entries with a requirement to like the brand page or provide an email address or mobile phone number. You can also control the number of entries per fan, and collect custom information from each entrant.

North Social Sweepstakes

The North Social Sweepstakes app lets you launch a sweepstakes in minutes on your FB page. It supports fan gates, includes tools for building your subscriber lists, and lets you embed a simple, customizable info-capture form. A North Social subscription is required.

Momentus Media Contest

The Momentus Media Contest app lets you create video, photo, and text-based contests, with winners decided by a judging process that you define.

Sweepstakes & Contests

Sweepstakes & Contests from Friend2Friend makes it easy to set up a sweepstakes or contest tab, including a form for collecting data, photo uploads, and more. Fan gates are also supported, as are newsfeed Share options to help word spread about your page.

Strutta Contests

Strutta Contests lets you create photo, video, audio, or text-based contests quickly and easily. Users can comment and vote on entries, share the contests through Facebook and Twitter, and four conest configurations are supported: public vote, judges pick, public vote for finalists with final winner picked by judges, or judges pick finalists and public votes on the winner.

Blog, RSS Feeds, and Other Imports

Feeding your blog or other RSS feeds directly into your FB page is a great idea. It means your page regularly has new content added, and also drives more traffic to your blog. You can also import your Twitter or other social network feeds directly into your Facebook page, which can greatly simplify keeping your page up-to-date. Some apps let you import the feeds directly to your newsfeed while others give you the option to just have it import to a tab.

Blog Tab

Blog Tab, a free app from TabFusion, lets you include your favorite blog within a tab on your page. You just provide the RSS or XML feed and Blog Tab does the rest.

Google+ Tab

The Google+ Tab, free from TabFusion, lets you import your Google+ stream as a tab within your Facebook page.

Tumblr Tab

Tumblr Tab, from TabFusion, lets you include your Tumblr blog as a tab within your Facebook page. The app is $10 per year.

Selective Tweets

Selective Tweets lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter, just by appending the #fb hashtag to the tweets you want to post. This way you’re not cluttering up your Page’s feed with tweets that may or may not be relevant.

North Social Twitter Feed

North Social’s Twitter Feed app makes it easy to import your Twitter feed into your fan page. It includes a customizable header, easy design interface, and management for sharing options.

Involver Twitter

Involver’s Twitter app syndicates your Twitter feed directly to your Facebook Page’s newsfeed. It requires a free Basic Involver subscription.

RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti syndicates RSS feeds to your Facebook wall. It can support multiple feeds and multiple walls, you choose the combination.

Involver RSS Feed

Involver’s RSS Feed app lets you syndicate your blog to the news tab on your Facebook page and automatically pushes updates to your fans’ news feeds. It’s included with a free Basic Involver subscription.

North Social RSS Feed

North Social’s RSS Feed app supports fan gates, have a customizable header, and includes the ability to customize the image and messaging when content is shared by your users. It requires a North Social subscription, starting at $19.99 per month.

eCommerce Tabs

The addition of ecommerce tabs to Facebook is relatively new. Until recently, the only way to sell things through Facebook was to redirect users to a different site to make purchases. Now, there are a number of apps that let you sell directly through Facebook (and, in some cases, other social media sites).

Owjo

Owjo lets you manage multiple storefronts on different social networks through a single interface. It even lets you host your store on other people’s websites by offering a cut of revenue. It’s easy to customize the look and feel of your site, has a completely secure payment platform, and even lets you create product bundles. It’s free to open an Owjo store, there’s no contract, and you only pay once you start making sales (you pay 7% of each sale plus normal credit card processing fees).

BigCommerce SocialShop2

BigCommerce lets you sell on a variety of platforms, including Facebook through their SocialShop2 app. You get a complete store on Facebook with point and click installation, a customizable display banner, real-time product search, and complete orders and returns right from Facebook. SocialShop2 is included free on all BigCommerce plans.

LunarStore

LunarStore, from LunarMods, is a freemium ecommerce app for Facebook that offers payment through PayPal or Amazon checkout and can be set up in as little as 15 minutes. There’s a free plan that has a 5% transaction fee but no monthly fee and allows for up to 50 products. Their paid plans allow for more items (and multiple photos for each item) and start at $19.95/month.

ShopTab

ShopTab is a Facebook app that includes inventory management, support for multiple languages and currencies, and FB share integration. Plans start at $10/month for up to 500 products. All the plans come with 24/7 support and a free 7-day trial.

Ecwid

Ecwid is an ecommerce widget provider that lets you easily set up a Facebook store in minutes. Ecwid can be integrated with virtually any site, including most common CMSs and even sites designed with programs like iWeb. In addition to integrating with Facebook, it also works with MySpace, Blogger, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Ning, and many more. You can use it with a variety of payment methods, including PayPal and Google Checkout, too. There are both free and paid plans with Ecwid, with the main difference being the number of products you can have (the free plan allows up to 100, while the paid plan allows up to 20,000).

Payvment

Payvment lets you set up a Facebook store for free. There’s a free version and two paid plans (starting at $29.95/month), with slightly different features for each. The main advantages paid plans have are that they automate promotion to fans and offer full analytics. All the plans allow for CSV catalog importing, social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, and email, setting of “featured” items, automated inventory control, and much more.

VendorShop

VendorShop is a free social shopping Facebook app with a number of useful features. You can have fan-only discounts to entice people to like you page, and shoppers don’t have to enable any apps to purchase from you. There are no subscription or transaction fees beyond standard PayPal fees to process your transaction.

Newsletter Signup Forms

It’s pretty important for brands to capture information about their fans outside of just Facebook. What happens if Facebook suddenly deletes your page or bans you? You will have lost the contact information of everyone who was a fan. That’s why it’s a good idea to make it easy for your fans to sign up for your newsletter from your page, and to encourage them to do so (exclusive newsletter-only offers are a great way to do just that).

MailChimp

MailChimp offers integration with Facebook in the form of a signup tab, embedding a signup form right on your Page.

Constant Contact Labs – Join My Mailing List

Constant Contact offers Join My Mailing List for setting up a subscribe form on your Facebook Page.

Other Interesting Apps

Depending on the type of page you’re creating, you might be interested in some of the following apps:

My Etsy

If you sell on Etsy, then the My Etsy app lets you add your Etsy store and/or favorites to your Facebook Page, with share functionality for each item. It also automatically posts to your news feed if one of your items is featured on the Etsy home page.

Genbook BookNow!

Genbook is scheduling software that can be integrated with Facebook to let people schedule appointments right from your FB page. It’s a great option for appointment-based businesses like salons, chiropractors, counselors, tattoo parlors, and more. A Genbook account is required to use BookNow.

Schedulicity

Schedulicity is another appointment and scheduling app that lets you connect with existing clients and lets them book appointments directly from Facebook.

PageLever

PageLever is an analytics suite for your Facebook pages. You can measure things like fan growth, mobile fans, comments, and likes, and lets you know which of your posts have performed best. There’s a free trial available, and after that plans start at $34 per month.

FAQ Page

FAQ Page makes it simple to create a F.A.Q. tab on your fan page. Enter questions and answers and it will automatically format them with a list of questions and accordian-format answers.

Poll

Poll lets you create quick polls for your pages. It’s easy to use and effective at collecting user consensus and data. Photos, videos, and links can also be added into polls, making it more versatile.

Conclusion

There are thousands of apps you can use on your Facebook pages, to do just about anything you want. With new support for iFrames, you can even embed entire web pages into your Facebook Pages, with little work other than setting up the initial page. Apps make it easier for non-tech-savvy users to create custom pages, though, and aren’t going anywhere in the immediate future.

What are your favorite apps, tools, and widgets for custom Facebook pages? Leave a comment below to share your finds with other readers!

The metrics you should be using

Read the original Post at Imedia Connection here:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=30946

 

• Jarvis Mak
• Contact

Web Analytics Posted on February 15, 2012

"You can't manage what you don't measure," is an old management adage. However, by the same token, just because you can measure something, does not mean you should manage by it.

I authored a previous iMedia article about why clicks are the wrong metric. In that article, I alluded to the view-through effectiveness of display advertising despite the absence of clicks. In the spirit of that conversation, I want to discuss the relevance of other metrics in determining campaign success.

Use: Brand measures like lift in awareness or consideration

You can't click on a billboard, radio, or TV ad but we know they impact awareness, consideration, even purchase intent. Of course, the same is true of online ads. If the campaign has a branding objective, then optimize to it, ideally with a real-time data-driven approach.

Brand marketers want solutions that demonstrate improvement over time, transfer learnings across campaigns from top of the funnel to mid-funnel, and finally, result in sales. Everyone loves search for converting in-market folks but don't always remember to widen the funnel. As a marketer, if you rely on offline media (namely, TV) to be your lone awareness vehicle, then you're subject to over-saturation in television and missing out on cross-media optimized exposure. Complement offline with a digital awareness initiative.

Use: Ideal customer composition

Most advertisers know their customers inside and out, or at least they think they do: They have detailed customer profiles, even personas of Jim the Technophile or Susan the Savvy Bargain Shopper. However, when it comes to reaching those audiences in media delivery, the richness of the Jim and Susan personas are often lost to become coarse gender and age descriptions of "men 25 to 54" and "women 18 to 34," respectively.

Publishers that have personas that perfectly match advertisers' personas are one step ahead of the game. For advertisers, you trust that the targets those publishers claim to have are good proxies for your ideal customers. If there are no publisher persona targets, then we've seen agencies often default to the age and gender target as the next best proxy.

Why use a proxy though? Optimize segment composition in real-time. How? With a survey-based approach. We tried this with a couple CPG brands, with excellent results. The first advertiser wanted to reach previous brand customers. Utilizing real-time survey input to optimize segments, targeting of previous customers increased by 50 percent over the course of the campaign. The second CPG advertiser wanted to reach frequent users, and the same technique resulted in the target composition of this audience growing by 40 percent during the campaign. Results were validated with an offline sales impact study from Nielsen with a 250 percent return on ad spend.

Use: LTV (Lifetime value) of acquired customers

For direct response advertisers, especially in finance and retail, customers acquired cheaply are often low-value customers, especially when promotions are involved. The value of more expensive leads (as measured by account balances or subsequent basket size and purchase frequency) ends up much higher than cheaper direct response leads. An agency that is maniacally focused on low CPA without regard to LTV is doing their advertiser a disservice.

To advertisers, this means arming your agencies with visibility into these LTV measures. It means you need to do homework about customer behavior and transactions so that agencies can also pass information about customer value along to publisher partners, even anecdotally. We once executed a campaign for a bank but we didn't have access to back-end metrics like deposit amounts. As the campaign slowly auto-optimized toward the metric we had, CPA, the agency provided us feedback that we should go back to what we had been doing before day 45 because after that point, although CPA improved, the average starting balance amounts started shrinking considerably. With that bit of feedback, we were able to rejigger settings to pre-day 45 and go back to acquiring higher value customers.

Ignore: CTR

See the aforementioned iMedia article. We almost always provide data about how optimal segments are negatively correlated with CTR. For many agencies, they are glad to get this analysis to provide back to their advertisers as part of ongoing education.

For example, we demonstrated to a customer that pursuing segments that demonstrated higher CTR for the campaign would have led to incorrect optimization. Trying to maximize CTR would have led to a lower quality audience, since "clickier" segments were not the ones with the highest target composition.

Ignore: Ad interaction rate

It is not universally true that ad interaction rate doesn't matter. When the rich media unit has rich functionality like lead capture or submit, some other transactional feature, or a product catalog based on recently shopped items, then interaction is highly relevant. This is usually accomplished with dynamic creative and an XML feed.

However, when ad interactions are really opportunities for an expanded canvas that tell a more elaborate brand story, the benefit is dubious at best. At Rocket Fuel, we repeatedly see that thesimpler ads are, the better. In fact, we have run static ads for a campaign alongside the long-looping Flash versions and find that performance is 50 to 300 percent better with simpler creative. 

If advertisers want to understand impact of ad interactions, work with your publisher partners to instrument their pixels in ad unit expansion frames. Get ahead of the game and work with your creative partners before the assets are finished. Then the publishers can do the same type of correlation analysis with a brand metric, as well as optimize in-flight if there really is a positive correlation.  

Ignore: Video completion rate

This is in the context of in-banner video. It is a natural extension of the other two "unimportant" metrics. Does it matter that a video plays all the way through to completion? How much does auto-start inflate the metrics? It really doesn't matter what percentage of ads went all the way to the end unless it was all reaching the desired customers. As a marketer, I'd be happy with static ads shown to the right audience over a 75 percent video completion rate to the wrong audience.

A very notable exception to this is when video completions are well-documented to correlate directly with sales, like movie trailers for theatrical releases.

Conclusion

In general, we almost always see that metrics about online ad engagement or interaction (alone) not translate to bottom line results as effectively as lifetime value, ideal customer targets, and changes in brand measures. Ad metrics can definitely be a part of the overall story of the campaign; however, I wouldn't recommend them in isolation. It happens too often that an agency measures (and eliminates) partners along a single dimension like ad interaction rate.

Instead, the advertiser and agency should compare partners along a multitude of dimensions. Better yet, go the extra step and attribute value along all these dimensions. Here are some thoughts to get you started on attribution. It is important to review and compare partners but measure in ways that give you a comprehensive view of their overall campaign impact.

Jarvis Mak  is VP of analytics for Rocket Fuel.

 

Study: Online Video Ads Beat TV Ads In Viewer Recall

From http://www.mediapost.com

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=151115&nid=127148

 

by Les Luchter, Yesterday, 4:46 PM

Viewers pay more attention to online video ads than to traditional TV commercials and also recall them better, according to new research that utilized Affectiva's facial tracking algorithms and second-by-second biometric modeling of cognition, excitement and stress levels.

The research measured the reactions of 48 viewers watching one hour of programming in Interpublic Group's West Coast IPG Media Lab.

Conducted by the Media Lab during March in conjunction with video ad network YuMe, the study determined that on average, online viewers pay more attention to the screen than do traditional TV viewers -- and the greater attention levels carry over to advertising.

Online video ads received 18.3% more viewer attention in the study than TV commercials -- a much higher disparity than the 8.5% greater viewer attention garnered by online video content over TV content.

This was largely due to the finding that when transitioning from program content to ads, the attention of TV viewers dropped off three times faster than that of online viewers.

While fast-forwarded ads, such as those recorded on a DVR, were partly to blame, IPG and YuMe found a much larger cause to be "the familiar cadence of TV content." Conversely, the study found that "systemic disruption" caused by online video's "unpredictable ad cadence and forced, short bursts of video ads (rather than predictable ad pods) appears to help decrease ad avoidance behaviors without causing consumer backlash..."

In fact, DVR users were found to pay higher-than-normal attention to commercials because they were concentrating on skipping them -- but their later recall was actually lower. "DVR users were 38% less likely to correctly recall the brand for any TV ad they saw, aided or unaided, compared to non-DVR users," the study found.

For TV viewers overall, paying attention during commercials had no effect on whether they could or could not remember them or recall them unaided. And those who recalled ads when aided actually had below-average attention scores. But online viewers who paid attention to ads later recalled them, with online video ad recall twice as high as TV ad recall -- "offering proof that recall and attention correlate," according to IPG and YuMe.

Both TV and online video content had plenty of competition from other media during the study, most notably smartphones. The 48 viewers studied had been surveyed a week earlier to determine how they normally watch TV, then told to bring with them what they needed to recreate their "normal" TV viewing experience.

They showed up at the Media Lab not only with phones, but with laptops, games, magazines, food, makeup and even a guitar, IPG and YuMe said. Other predetermined distractions were also available -- from DVRs stocked with participants' favorite shows to their own email and IM programs.

All these off-screen distractions hurt attention levels more during advertising than during program content. As the study summary put it: "If given the chance to avoid ads, most people will."

Yet while distractions affected both online and regular TV viewing, with over half of video viewers said to have had a second screen active during commercials, the distractions hurt TV to a larger extent -- with 62% of TV ads avoided while they played, compared with 45% of online video ads. Also, 17.5% of TV ads were fast-forwarded.

"DVRs hurt TV advertising in a way that has not yet come to online video," according to the research summary. "Compared to TV, online video is measurably better at delivering ads that are impossible to skip technologically and impractical to skip behaviorally."

A final conclusion: "normal ratings data is not nearly complex enough to measure how chaotic and highly individualized media consumption is."

MediaPost Publications What Is A Video Interaction Really Worth? 05/11/2010

by Alex Rowland,

There has been a lot of attention paid to online video advertising over the past several years.  With the explosive growth in consumption and subsequent influx of cash, the number of video ad delivery vehicles has increased and the pricing for these units has been all over the map.  This can be incredibly confusing and frustrating for anyone buying media in this space.  Why are prices for each unit so divergent?  How can I better determine if what I am buying is worth the investment?  Answering these questions becomes much easier if we look at the foundations for pricing in video and work to evaluate the relative importance of these foundations to your brand goal.  

While there are many ancillary factors that can impact price, the primary drivers in video are viewer intent and attention.  Intent can be defined as a measurement of how interested the viewer was in the content when they started watching.  Attention can be defined as simply a measure of how much of the user's focus was captured once the view was initiated.  If you evaluate each different video advertising option under this matrix, understanding price disparity gets a little easier.  

Let's take in-banner autoplay video.  This ad unit may capture slightly more attention than a standard display unit, but there is virtually no intent.  Pre-roll has similarly low levels of intent, but captures substantially more of the viewer's attention because it sits between the viewer and the video she wants to watch.  Moving further up the pricing scale, virtual currency and gaming platforms have begun offering incentivized views that enable users to watch an ad to completion in exchange for receiving virtual currency or in-game items.  Each of these units is progressively more expensive because they deliver more attention, but they still do not generate high levels of intent.

Only by moving to Click2Play units do you begin to see user intent as a significant factor in the value (and price) of an ad impression.  Intent can be important, especially given the evolving social contract with consumers on the Web.  A user who has elected to watch an advertisement is going to be engaged in a way that a traditional form of interruptive advertising will find very difficult to match.  There's a reason why YouTube charges 20 cents to $1 or higher per video view for these types of engagements.  When you bring high levels of user intent together with high levels of attention, you create a highly valuable interaction with your viewer.  This appears to be one of the seminal conclusions of Vivaki's recent study in which the Ad Selector unit pioneered by Hulu (in which consumers can choose which ad to watch) scored dramatic improvements in click-through and recall rates.  

As Web video advertising continues to evolve, new ad units will continue to emerge.  When evaluating a buy for a new type of unit, it's always helpful to evaluate price based upon the level of attention and intent generated by the placement.  And given the magnitude of price difference between these units, be sure that you are actually receiving the unit for which you paid a heavy premium.  For example, networks will sometimes offer "blended" campaigns that mix Click2Play and Autoplay.  These units differ dramatically in value -- and unless the network can provide a precise breakdown of the viewership by publisher and by unit, assume that the vast majority of the views are occurring Autoplay In-banner across a network of mid-tier publishers. 

Over time the relative value of each type of user interaction will become clearer, and pricing will begin to become a little more standardized.  Until then, trying different placements can give you the information necessary to buy cost-effectively and identify unique opportunities that generate maximum impact for your brand at a fair price.  Users want to see brands think a little more creatively than the standard repurposed 30-second television spot.  Give them the interaction they want.     

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=127925#

YouTube opens virtual screening room

RYAN NAKASHIMA
Associated Press

June 19, 2008 at 12:00 PM EDT

LOS ANGELES — Google Inc.'s YouTube is setting up a virtual screening room to bring the work of independent filmmakers to a global audience.

Struggling filmmakers already use YouTube to kick-start viral marketing campaigns. The new feature, which debuts Wednesday, gives them an easy-to-find home — and makes them partners in drawing new ad revenue.

“Hopefully as they see thousands of people watching their films, it's going to be a very eye-opening experience,” said Sara Pollack, YouTube's film and animation manager.

The screening room will highlight four new films a week, picked by a YouTube editorial panel...

Read more: YouTube opens screening room for indie filmmakers 

Web #2 Ad Medium in Five Years

IDG

According to a recently released study by IDC, the U.S. Internet Advertising 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis, overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. During the forecast period, Internet advertising will grow about eight times as fast as advertising at large.

The Internet will go from the number 5 medium all the way to the number 2 medium in just 5 years, says the report, making it bigger than newspapers, bigger than cable TV, bigger even than broadcast TV, and second only to direct marketing.

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising during this time...

Read More: Web #2 Ad Medium in Five Years

MixPo Launches Online Video Advertising Platform...

Announces Pacts with Real Estate Leaders, Including ActiveRain

SEATTLE --(Business Wire)-- Mixpo, an online video advertising company dedicated to serving the local small and medium-size business (SMB) market, today announced that it has launched a comprehensive online video advertising platform and signed a series of agreements with three leading organizations in the real estate sector, including ActiveRain, Miller Condominium Marketing (MCM Group), and Realogics/UrbanCondominiums.com. ActiveRain represents more than 80,000 member-agents across North America, while the MCM Group and Realogics each represent many of the Pacific Northwest's premier condominium developments.

Most Downloaded Content Not Watched On TV

Ars Technica
By Jacqui Cheng          | Published: March 21, 2008 - 06:32AM CT

Video content online may be growing in popularity, but the vast majority isn't getting anywhere near a TV screen. New survey results from Macrovision (commissioned by Harris Interactive) say that only a small number of adults who download video content from the Internet play it on a TV or DVD player. The results expose challenges for content providers looking to expand their viewership of online content, and serve as a reminder about the restrictive limitations of DRM.

The company surveyed 2,254 adults in the US during December 2007, and found that 43 percent download some form of digital media from the Internet. Over a quarter said that they download TV shows regularly, and 15 percent said that they download full-length movies. Still, more than half of those surveyed said that they go no further than their monitors to watch that video content.

This should come as no surprise—most content providers use DRM in such a way that it makes watching video anywhere other than the PC inconvenient, if not downright impossible. For example, video from sites like Hulu can only be watched through a browser, so the only way to watch it on a TV would be to use a computer connected to it (something that the majority of users don't have). Similarly, downloads from NBC Direct may not be limited to the web, but can still only be played on a single authorized computer at a time.

Read more: Most Downloaded Content Not Watched On TV

Disney takes big plunge into online video

Original programming from a new studio dedicated to digital projects debuts today.

By Dawn C. Chmielewski, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 28, 2008

Eighty years after the 7 1/2 -minute cartoon "Steamboat Willie" helped launch the career of a certain iconic mouse, Walt Disney Co. has returned to its short-form roots with the debut of a digital studio that will develop original content for the Internet.

Stage 9 Digital Media, quietly in the works for two years, will be unveiled today with the premiere of "Squeegees," a comedy series about window-washer slackers, on ABC.com and YouTube. It is the first of a planned 20 online programs currently in development.
"We've all seen the appeal of short-form content grow over the past few years," said Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group. "The launch of this experimental new media studio allows us to play in this space with some quality content, while giving us an interesting venue for telling stories in a different form."

ABC Television Group joins a growing number of TV studios, including CBS and Warner Bros., that have set up separate digital creative teams to produce the kind of instant-gratification videos that are popular online, especially among young viewers who can no longer be counted on to watch the networks' prime-time shows.

Read more: Disney takes big plunge into online video