Poking Fun at Local Video
There has been lots of talk about local merchant video ads this year, a trend pushed forward in the most meaningful way by Citysearch’s May integration of video ads. We’ve also seen every major U.S. IYP do the same this year, in various ways.
As we’ve mentioned many times, this brings video advertising within the grasp of many SMBs, as it’s always been of interest, but cost prohibitive on cable. Economics aside, part of the ecosystem that is developing around online video also involves a rising quality standard pushed by online video vendors such as TurnHere and EZ Show.
But no one can forget the cheesy do-it-yourself local video ads we’ve traditionally seen on late night cable, usually involving a proprietor and a shaky camcorder. These aren’t going away, but lower cost, higher quality videos from the new wave of online video vendors will soon make them something of a throwback.
A small outfit called Bloodshot Records parodies this classic form of advertising in a short video clip (at least it appears they’re not being serious). Check it out here.
I work at Fave Media, a Chicago-based local search engine that features videos for all of our small business advertisers (www.getfave.com). Even in the early stages of our company, we have seen first hand how local business is attracted to online video. We have local businesses with no websites who have produced online videos for our site. Because we have historically done all of our video production in-house, we see the cost of high quality video production as relatively low. Because we are a Chicago-only site that is far removed from Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley, I would love to know what folks think of the site.
Comment by Jim Pomposelli — January 3, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
Jim,
Sounds interesting. I’ll check it out and we can take the rest of the convo offline.
Comment by Mike Boland — January 5, 2008 @ 11:07 am