AOL’s video search site Truveo hasn’t seen its name on this blog in some time. Founder Tim Tuttle used to speak at our conferences back in the day (as in 2005 … Internet years). Since then the company has quietly built itself up to the second-largest video search engine behind “Google sites” (which include YouTube and Google video), with 26.5 million monthly visitors.

This week Truveo announced a relaunch for the 17 countries where it operates. This will include a cleaner interface, fewer ads, and an extension of its index to sources that are now in the thousands and videos that total 350 million.

There will be new navigation features to better search this index, including browsing and discovery features to watch videos based on channel, category, show title, popularity and other viral features such as “most Twittered” (presumably most followed or mentioned). This is what the company needs to do if it’s to take share from the comparatively spartan YouTube experience.

Lastly, the company announced it will work with Univision to power the video search on its site. This could be a good combo, as Univision brings more and more of its video content online. Stepping back, this also represents a model Truveo could move toward, as more and more television properties move content online and will need ways to index, search and present the video in a compelling way.

More partnerships like this also presumably add to Truveo’s library and boost its content that can be accessed across its network and on Truveo proper.

TV and local social media are being integrated in “Prius Neighborhood,” a new “community-generated” TV program that will highlight the green sensibility of Toyota’s Prius hybrid. Gas pumpers will watch the program on pumpside TVs at more than 1,000 gas stations in over 100 DMAs. They can go to a Web site to submit local events and comments.

The GSTV listings are also searchable on the Web site by ZIP code and via regional Twitter pages. Users can also become fans on Facebook. GSTV programming also features ESPN sports, CBS news and entertainment, local weather and C-store promotions.

We’ve heard a few (admittedly anecdotal) claims of SMB video’s effectiveness in raising clickthrough rates and engagement levels from those that have begun to offer it. The numbers we’ve heard from the likes of eLocalListing, Weblocal.ca and Brownbook are that listings with video are seeing anywhere between 2x and 12x CTRs over listings that don’t have video.

Mixpo is one of the online video providers out there that is offering an easy-to-use tool to create video. One of its selling points is closely tied to these engagement metrics — it builds itself on a series of calls to action embedded in videos and a strong analytics dashboard (more on Mixpo in past posts).

Recently the company put out another round of case studies that showcase some of these data coming out of the local video campaigns of its advertisers. These include everything from regional McDonald’s franchises to academia, and ran as 300×250 display ads on its distribution partners’ sites.

One example is the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau. Its goal was to promote the region by spotlighting local chefs, winemakers and entertainers. It collected a bunch of existing footage and put it together with Mixpo’s VideoAds platform (WYSIWYG production tool).

Different Ads were used in different places and at different times, such as weekly, monthly or seasonal promotions. This was done by subbing in different messaging and calls to action, which is easier with a tool like VideoAds than it has traditionally been with local video advertising such as cable.

Here are the results according to Mixpo:

The VideoAd achieved an overall engagement rate (ER) of 1.65 percent.
This impressive ER is 16X better than the clickthrough rate (CTR) of typical
display ads.

In less than 3 weeks, the VideoAd generated more than 1100 clicks, for a
CTR of 0.53 percent.

Viewers were highly engaged. They watched, on average, more than 67
percent of the VideoAd. Forty-three percent of viewers watched the
VideoAd all the way to completion.

During the promotional period, viewers watched a total of 1200 minutes of
the VideoAd.

This VideoAd campaign delivered a $1/engagement ROI. For this client and
publisher, the ROI for a display ad is $4/click.

Generally, isolating video as a variable is tough and there are a number of other factors that could account for higher than average CTRs (are naturally strong businesses more inclined to, or more capable of, paying for a video?).

But I won’t get into a whole discussion of causal relationships versus natural correlations. It appears video is having an effect on online listings’ performance, for many of the reasons we’ve discussed in the past. Mixpo has also been effective in isolating video as a variable by comparing it to advertiser goals and past benchmarks.

In that way, the company can not only help advertisers boost engagement metrics but also help its publisher partners better monetize their display ad inventory. Remember these aren’t in-stream (pre-roll) ads but rather 300×250 display ad units that contain video.

Benefits in the future could also come with working with cable TV stations to offer their advertisers bundled TV and online distribution. The online ads can supplement TV ads, using the same creative edited into short videos and distributed to a separate online audience.

We’ll expand these and other video case study findings in an upcoming report.

Leading SMB video production house TurnHere announced an affiliate program today, which will allow Web site publishers and local search sites to offer video to their advertisers. This essentially lowers the barriers to resell TurnHere’s customized video production.

Previously, working with TurnHere required a business development process that spun out certified resellers (of sorts) for its local video production. Through this system, TurnHere prioritized larger publishers, which hold the most opportunity (read: direct local selling channels).

The affiliate program now not only makes it easier for smaller publishers to get on board with TurnHere, but it also grows TurnHere’s opportunity further down the tail. This should grow the company’s revenues while putting some money into affiliates’ pockets via rev share.

To the latter point, video production capability will be a strong selling point for affiliates to grow their own advertiser bases. This can be a retention play as well as a hook to get new advertisers in the door and build long-term relationships.

This comes at a time when online video’s measurable qualities and lower price tag ($899 in this case) makes it an attractive choice over television advertising. These are some of the growth drivers in our Local Video Forecast released last summer (updated data coming soon). We’re meanwhile seeing more and more smaller publishers integrate SMB video.

TurnHere has the ability to provide this “hook” for smaller publishers, as its highly customized videos stand out among the many flavors of entry-level video in the market– some of which are more automated or involve stock footage. These definitely have their merits (including price point), but TurnHere’s decidedly more personalized videos have been a key point of differentiation for the company so far.

Lastly, this announcement is in line with a trend we’ve seen play out at TurnHere over the past year. Though its video production strays from automation, its operations are becoming more and more automated. A little over a year ago, it integrated a streamlined process for advertiser feedback and post production.

Today’s announcement similarly streamlines its business development process and allows it to take a bigger bite out of the market. This will augment the many deals it’s been able to sign with top local publishers such as Yellowpages.com, Superpages and Citysearch.

The affiliate program has already signed on a short list of smaller vertical publishers including BedandBreakfast.com and WeddingBook.com. It’s previewing many others and will soon open it up more broadly, according to COO John McWeeny.

________

Related: See our video interview with TurnHere’s Jared Simon at SES Chicago.

In a June 2 article in The Wall Street Journal, summarizing interviews at the recent ‘D’ Conference in Carlsbad, CA, cable and media mogul John Malone talked to Walt Mossberg about monetization and pricing models in the new era of TV. (Oh, by the way, the word is now “video” — only older folks say “TV” anymore).

One of Malone’s key points is that cable as a product was able to succeed when it was able to blur the distinction, in the consumer’s mind, between transport and content. Consumers were willing to pay incrementally for certain content, because it was delivered via a proprietary transport platform. This has yet to happen on the Internet and mobile platforms — indeed, there’s no guarantee that it will.

Some other highlights from the interview:

• It took decades of lobbying and advocating, and major new federal legislation to even establish the legality of the paid-content business model for cable TV.
• Nobody (he mentions Hulu.com by name) has managed to generate a meaningful revenue stream from video ads. Malone thinks there will need to be paid-content models. (Note the parallels here to the dialog on the same subject for print media that have moved online — the economic imperative to move to paid content.)
• Malone sees TV programming eventually becoming all random access (but bandwidth is insufficient today for this).
• A key role in the new video world will be the aggregator — the central party that sits next to the tsunami of content from the Internet, and turns this and other entertainment into paid-content feeds to consumers.

Kelsey colleague Peter Krasilovsky, in an earlier post, noted Malone’s conclusion that there is “no easy answer to local.”

Everyzing, a video search company we’ve written about a few times, today announced a partnership with NBC Universal, and an $8.25 million C round led by NBC’s Peacock Equity.

The most notable part of the deal is that Everyzing will run the video search capability across NBC’s online sites, including its flagship NBC.com, CNBC, Bravo, Sci-Fi and Telemundo. As NBC ports more and more video to these sites, searchability becomes an important consideration. Everyzing will help it get there, with a powerful engine for processing and indexing video content, including the generation of searchable transcripts.

Video content obviously isn’t inherently searchable the way text is, making video search engines like Everyzing (and that provided by blinkx, ScanScout and Adap.tv) increasingly important. Once you generate text from transcripts, adjacent Web site info, and the other combination of methods that comprise these engines’ “secret sauce,” video can become more searchable.

But importantly, the parallel goal accomplished by Everyzing’s “MetaPlayer” video processing technology is generating contextual hooks that can be used for better ad targeting. As we’ve written in the past (quoting myself so I don’t have to repeat myself):

Beyond the user-centric nature of the MetaPlayer, its underlying technology could also be used for better video monetization. In other words, the same contextual hooks that its speech recognition uncovers to index video will also serve to assign meaning for better contextual ad matching. This not only deals with individual words, as is done with text ads, but also employs pattern matching technology to make sense of decidedly more complex video

This will be a powerful tool for NBC as its online video libraries grow (the partnership doesn’t include Hulu at the outset, however). The value will be shown in better ad targeting as well as additional traffic via VSEO.

I’m just returning from the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica where I moderated a session on online and mobile marketing analytics (fun stuff). The good news is that there was lots of excitement at the show surrounding evolving user behavior that’s driving shifts from offline to online media, online to mobile, and the interplay between them all.

The bad news is that there’s still a great deal of confusion among advertisers and agencies about how to make sense of them, especially in combination. In other words, moving from impression-based media to those that are capable of much greater levels of interaction leaves them confused about how to measure value.

Some of the transactional or conversion-generating capabilities of mobile, for example, don’t fit into the boxes that agencies check in their media planning processes. The media planning cycle likewise doesn’t allow for the rapid action that’s required for effectiveness in lots of online media such as viral video campaigns.

So the result is like shoving a square peg through a round hole: Online video and mobile marketing campaigns are being discussed in terms of impressions and CPMs. This makes sense for lots of online video and for mobile display ads to a certain extent. But a much greater portion of mobile revenues over the next few years will shift to search.

This will require brand advertisers to think about, buy and measure the medium in a whole new way. Maybe it will mean more CPC, maybe more CPA, maybe more pay-per-call (let’s hope not too many more acronyms). But CPM will not be the standard unit of pricing in mobile, and mobile will need a budget of its own (currently comes out of “digital”). Still, CPM is what you hear about most at tech and media conferences.

Some speakers I saw at the conference argued that we need a standard measurement that combines and “dumbs down” the media buying across all these evolving media. That would be nice — and certainly lead to greater advertiser adoption — but probably isn’t going to happen.

That would essentially require focusing on a lowest common denominator that misses out on all the unique capabilities of these platforms. Not to mention that Madison Avenue should evolve rather than the technology devolve. They’re smart people, and they’ve been able to wrap their brains around search engine marketing to a certain degree (mostly outsourced).

Bottom line, there is much more attention paid to branding products than to any concern over whether they actually move off the shelf. In television (and the Internet for that matter), that was fine because the gap between the living room and the store was a matter of miles. Now that we’re dealing with a device whose distance to the store shelf approaches zero, the purchase funnel shrinks considerably. That’s going to require a new way of thinking.

Don’t take The Kelsey Group’s word for the fact that more marketers are switching some of their advertising dollars into the Internet. Here’s what eMarketer wrote a week ago. “In the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories.” The fact that eMarketer actually put those words into an article can only be traced to the fact that it got some hard numbers from the Society of Digital Agencies. It is no surprise that “81 percent of respondents said they plan to invest at least as much in digital marketing in 2009 as in the previous year.”

Happily, eMarketer backs up these figures with another study by Ad Media Partners. The research shows that marketing executives are planning to increase digital spending in social media marketing (77 percent), search marketing (76 percent), mobile marketing (75 percent), behavioral marketing (70 percent), lead generation (63 percent), video advertising (60 percent) and e-mail marketing (58 percent).

EMarketer sums all this up by pointing out that “the combination of accountability, conversion and the infusion of digital media into every facet of life makes the future look bright — for marketers making the move to digital.”

Anyone in the radio or television broadcasting industry who needs to understand how to best take advantage of digital media needs to be at the Winning Media Strategies conference to be held May 20-22 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C. The Kelsey Group and BIA Advisory Services have put together an event that will pay incredible dividends to those broadcasters willing to make the small investment of time and money.

Microsoft announced today that it’s working with Spotzer to bring video production capability to small businesses in the Netherlands. This will be part of a broader product under Microsoft’s advertising division that involves a self-service platform for SMBs to create and manage video, display and text ads.

According to the release:

On the basis of a few simple steps they first choose the type of media they want to buy and the extent to which they want to target. Then they can upload an existing ad or, if they don’t have one yet, get a new ad. They may choose ads from a library of professionally produced videos and banners. These can be personalized with branding material or other materials that the advertiser provides. All licensing and creative services are provided by Microsoft Advertising at no additional cost to the advertiser.

The release doesn’t specify points of distribution, but it will presumably involve Microsoft’s own network and its publisher partners. Ads will be placed based on geographic and demographic targeting. SMBs are called out as intended recipients for the new product, having a minimum price tag of 1,000 euros (presumably an annual figure).

This is a good move for Spotzer that will help it get more advertisers. Feeding video into Microsoft’s network could also give it additional distribution for its existing advertisers. In these ways, it’s similar to the deal it formed last fall with MerchantCircle. Like that deal, it also offers a library of preproduced videos to advertisers.

For Microsoft, it brings in better video production capability. This makes it similar to the deal Google recently formed with SpotMixer to bring video production into the Google TV Ads program. This could be a good move as demand grows for online video among SMB advertisers.

Though economic conditions are forcing businesses to reduce ad spending, there is also a fair amount of budget reevaluation. This is causing lots of ad dollars to shift toward more measurable (and less expensive) media. This could bode well for things like search, mobile and online video, and not so well for many forms of already-declining traditional media.

After Brownbook’s announcement, this is the second SMB video product launched in Europe this month. It appears to be currently limited to the Netherlands but could expand geographically over time.

Apartments are in the vanguard among online marketplace verticals, as more apartment owners take advantage of Web and mobile features to target prospects — especially younger prospects.

Indeed, apartment owners are increasingly leveraging video to show off floor plans and surrounding communities. They’re also using social media such as MySpace to differentiate their communities and give them a “vibe,” especially for higher-end properties. And they’re using mobile-enabled sites to catch prospects as they drive by.

Organic search also comes into play. NCI, which produces ApartmentFinder, has seen the site jump 52.5 percent in the past six months, according to blog notes from Chairman Dan McCarthy. Indeed, new data from comScore for March show that among traditional apartment shopper media with print and Web sites, ApartmentFinder now has the second most used apartment site after ForRent. (Apartment pure-plays like Rent.com and Apartments.com might have higher overall traffic.)

“We haven’t driven our growth through spending a lot of money on keywords and unqualified traffic,” says McCarthy. “We’ve focused on optimizing the long tail of organic search. We’ve focused on creating a simple product for consumers that gives them lots of ways to interact with the apartment communities we list.”