AgendiZe announced today from the EADP conference in Spain that it will partner with Videoagency to power its video ads with call to action features. This brings AgendiZe’s signature click-to-call and save and share features (profiled in a past post) to video for the first time.

Mixpo provides similar functionality, which is a strong proposition to advertisers that want to take advantage of the direct response capabilities of video that is served in a local search context. This is the “lean forward” mode of video viewing we’ve examined in the past.

This is a logical step for AgendiZe, whose call to action buttons in local listings bring social and personalization capabilities to IYPs. As video is increasingly integrated in these venues, AgendiZe is following suit. Its existing relationships with Yellowbook.com and Yellowpages.ca, among others, could also help Videoagency and the combined offering gain IYP channel relationships.

Videoagency currently distributes mostly on search engines, utilizing a video SEO tool in combination with increasing video favorability in search engine results (universal search). Like Spot Runner and TurnHere, the company relies on an outsourced network of 4,000 filmmakers to shoot and edit content for SMB videos.

The company is yet another in this quickly growing segment of SMB video vendors. Differentiation will be vital if and when we reach a shakeout in the space, and actionable videos like these (and Mixpo) are one point of differentiation. Check out the demo here.

Despite some traction by sites like Yelp — OK, specifically Yelp — the hybrid IYP/rating-and-review segment remains something of a question mark in the industry. It remains to be seen whether such sites can attract a large number of frequent reviewers and users — and not just recent college grads and/or mothers. It also remains to be seen whether they can cross the chasm out of restaurants and bars into the gold mine of services traditionally mined by Yellow Pages.

Besides Yelp, other sites abound, including Cox’s Kudzu, Boorah, Loladex and Citysearch’s Insider Pages. But it is hard to get a handle on how well they are doing. MojoPages, a newer Yelp-like site, reports it has been making progress.

A year out of the gate, the San Diego-based site claims a solid base of 500,000 user reviews and 100,000 local advertisers across the U.S., mostly on the backs of partners including Superpages.com, Marchex, ServiceMagic and ServiceMaster. It also has coupon distribution with ValPak.

President Jon Carder, a 29-year-old vertical search pro who previously sold a mortgage-oriented venture to IdeaLab, says the site has been seeing steady growth. He acknowledges the comparisons to Yelp and others, but says MojoPages has been developing its own unique mix of features, including video reviews, e-mail notification for reviewed businesses, and an “ask friends” feature. It also has set its algorithms to bring up more relevant results.

A search on MojoPages for Carpet Cleaners in Sen Diego will get you mostly relevant results, he says. If you do a search for carpet cleaners in San Diego on Yelp, he says, “six of the 10 results aren’t even carpet cleaners.”

Online video production company Spot Runner announced today that it has received $51 million from Legg Mason, Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), Grupo Televisa, and Groupe Arnault/LVMH.

The company will use the funding to continue growing its capacity to deliver video advertising, both online and off. These investments are also strategic in nature, involving a collaboration of international media assets with Spot Runner’s video production platform. According to the release:

DMGT is one of the largest and most successful media companies in the United Kingdom with interests in national newspapers and related digital operations, local media, business and financial information, exhibitions and radio. In addition to the United Kingdom, it has operations in Central Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia, the Middle East and Australasia.

“Spot Runner is transforming the way media is optimized and targeted across a broad spectrum of advertising mediums. As a media company with one of the largest bases of local advertisers in Europe, we look forward to collaborating with Spot Runner and applying its model to our business, particularly as we continue to innovate in connecting advertisers with local audiences,” said David Roddick, commercial director of Northcliffe Media, the local media division of DMGT.

Grupo Televisa, S.A.B. is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world. Televisa operates four broadcast channels in Mexico that have consistently maintained a sign-on to sign-off audience share of more than 70 percent. Televisa also has interests in the production of pay-television networks, international distribution of television programming, direct-to-home satellite services, cable television, magazine publishing and distribution, and radio broadcasting.

“Spot Runner has demonstrated its ability to create meaningful value for media companies by bringing new categories of advertisers to television and other media and by helping larger companies invest their budgets more intelligently and effectively,” said Alfonso de Angoitia, executive vice president of Grupo Televisa, S.A.B. “We feel Spot Runner’s model has great applicability to the Latin American market and we’re excited to explore new opportunities to partner.”

Groupe Arnault/LVMH is the world’s leading luxury products group, with a portfolio of over 60 prestigious brands including Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Donna Karan, Sephora and TAG Heuer.

“The global media landscape is undergoing a sea change. For advertisers to be effective, they will need to completely shift their thinking about how media is targeted and distributed, and how creative can be versioned for multiple audiences,” said Antoine Arnault, head of communications for Louis Vuitton. ”Spot Runner is the clear leader in this area. As one of the largest advertisers in the fashion category, we’re very enthusiastic about the prospect of working with them to capitalize on these transformations.”

Spot Runner has seen lots of action lately, emblematic of the activity level in the local online video space. This includes the recent acquisition of the GlobeShooter production network and that of local online advertising firm Weblistic.

Funding in this round also included existing investors Allen & Co., Battery Ventures, Capital Research and Management, CBS, Index Ventures, The Interpublic Group, Tudor Investment Corp. and WPP.

Fox Interactive Media will launch a self service video ad tool, according to the company’s stations group GM Ron Berryman. He announced the product, known as FIM AdStore, from the stage at DDL on Friday.

This will be geared towards local and national advertisers that wish to create video ads and then bid on CMP inventory on FIM properties. It will initially be available to advertisers through Fox TV station websites, and will essentially connect advertisers to video producers and writers through an online community.

This joins the quickly growing segment of companies that offer easier ways for companies of all sizes to produce and distribute video online. Many of these companies were in full force at DDL, including Mixpo, PixelFish, BuzzSpot, VideoBloom and SpotMixer.

These each have different models, explored at the links above, and are experimenting with different price points and channel strategies to reach SMBs. At this early stage of local merchant video, experimentation is expected as are lots of company launches, before we see a shakeout in the space.

The challenge will be finding the right channel relationships to reach a very fragmented SMB market. Yellow Pages are one route that many vendors are vying for (TurnHere has been the most successful here), as are newspapers, and national or regional companies with localized constituents like real estate agencies and auto dealer groups. Spot Runner has been creative in signing such deals with Coldwell Banker and Lexis Nexis.

Fox could have some success signing up companies on its own, given it’s name brand and online reach. Meanwhile its television assets offer the saleability of cross channel video distribution, which could be attractive to some advertisers if bundled in.

More coverage from ClickZ’s Kate Kaye who was also in full force at DDL last week, and interviewed Berryman.

Wave V of The Kelsey Group’s annual consumer tracking survey, User View, was just completed in March. The survey asks online consumers about 30 questions, covering topics such as information sources used for local shopping, level of Internet usage and participation in “user-generated content.”  The findings from this survey of about 1,000 online consumers, show some clear developments:  

• Continued migration to various online media as information sources for local shopping.    

• In rating online information sources for local shopping, consumers give the highest value to transaction-related information (such as price and product availability).    

• 30 percent of consumers say they use the Internet “considerably more” than a year ago, and another 32 percent “somewhat more.”    

• In general, search engines generated a surprisingly strong showing as a tool for local shopping.    

• 30 percent of consumers have submitted some form of user-generated content within the past six months – ranging form a numeric rating all the way up to uploading a self-produced video to YouTube.   

• Over half (56 percent) of consumers have watched online (or downloaded) a video, movie or TV program within the past month. 

Mixpo today announced a new platform that brings together video production, editing and tracking/analytics.

The production dashboard has drag and drop functionality for ad creative including existing still images and a library of stock footage, and Mixpo’s signature call to action overlays. This also integrates with the reporting dashboard that allows companies to track the success of their video ad placement — whether it be on their own domains or distributed.

The VideoAd, a dynamic video advertising player that businesses can easily embed into in-banner video ads, search engine landing pages, Web pages, or blogs. Each VideoAd includes interactive triggers, designated areas where users click to request more information or reach the business directly, generating highly qualified and measureable leads.

The Studio, where companies can easily create high-quality VideoAds from existing video, photo, and audio files, from a broad range of stock media options, or through the services of Mixpo’s video production partner.

Ad Rotation, a Mixpo feature that allows companies to test and compare different versions of a VideoAd for effectiveness by running, or rotating, the versions simultaneously.

The Dashboard, where clients measure how a VideoAd is performing by tracking the number of impressions and views, playthrough and conversion, viewers’ geographic locations, and referring sites.

Automatically generated landing pages for each VideoAd, providing the search terms and other meta data to maximize exposure to more than 100 video sites powered by a range of search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and Blinkx.

The company also today announced a series of partnerships in the real estate vertical — one that’s shown a particular affinity for online video at the medium’s early stage. Most notably, real estate social network ActiveRain will integrate Mixpo’s platform into its platform. This gives the company access to 80,000 real estate professionals — a qualified, self-selected sample whose ActiveRain membership is telling of their early adopter status.

Real estate has been a key vertical for Mixpo, shown by the partnerships announced in conjunction with this product launch (which also include Miller Condominium Marketing and Realogics/UrbanCondominiums.com). But the company will target most other verticals, and the versatility of the platform suggests it will be salable as such.

Mixpo President Anupam Gupta will demo the product in the last session today at Drilling Down on Local in Seattle. If you’re at the show, come check it out. Also check out an abridged version here.

MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper publisher with titles such as The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News, has teamed up with TauMed to launch a video-centric health vertical. The vertical launches this month at four of MNG’s smaller papers. It will eventually be incorporated across the chain. Other local media partners are also being lined up.

TauMed, which is privately funded and has 12 employees, is the brainchild of Tauseef Bashir, a former executive with FAST Search and Transfer, the search company recently acquired by Microsoft. FAST’s influence is readily apparent in the service’s intent to make every action searchable. (MediaNews Group is also a FAST client.) “All the information is search driven,” says Bashir.

As with other health portals in the marketplace, the service isn’t focused on local information other than directory content featuring doctor and hospital search. More local content will come in a second phase, says Bashir. The local effort will be aided by the promotional, sales and editorial capabilities of the local syndication partners. Ratings and reviews are probably the core of the local experience, he notes. The site will also be mobile enabled.

The market to produce, distribute and/or enhance small-business videos has intensified in recent months, as TurnHere, Denver MultiMedia, DMC, Spot Runner, Mixpo, BuzzSpot, EZ Show, Spotzer and others have competed (often via third-party Yellow Pages and city guides) to land accounts. Now comes Redwood City, California-based SpotMixer, which has raised $8 million from Kleiner Perkins and others.

Launching next week at Kelsey’s Marketplaces event in Seattle, SpotMixer provides a combination of production tools and distribution capabilities that allow small business to easily make videos on an “all you can eat” basis and distribute them. The service is launching with a subscription “plan” that ranges from $59 to $79 per month, with fees declining with longer commitments. Additional link fees are up to the media partners.

SpotMixer has been developed on the back of One True Media, a consumer-oriented video service aimed at families and young adults since its launch in February 2005. That service, which cost $3.99 per month, simplified the process of producing a video and sending it to other platforms. It has attracted 3 million registrants since launch.

The new service was developed by company founders Mark Moore and John Love, who noticed that a number of SMBs were piggybacking on the cheap tools to create their own videos, and embed them on YouTube, e-mail, their own sites, etc. Moore and Love speculated that SMBs probably needed something a little more “heavyweight.” The founders have since been joined by Yahoo! Search Marketing veterans Kathleen Farley and Brett Gardner, among others. There are 20 people at the company.

A fairly unique aspect of the service is that its reseller partners, such as Yellow Pages and city sites, can “seed” their sites with generic but category-specific videos for each listing, in hopes of upselling them to a specific solution. This approach has been tried a few times with Web sites, but video is a new frontier.

It’s an attractive offering and well-priced. The questions we ask ourselves are whether small businesses will make their own videos, even with easy to use tools; whether they will ever want to produce more than one or two, even producing holiday specific videos; and whether they will develop an aggressive media program if left to their own devices. The transferable, cross-channel approach is also an interesting question mark. AgendiZe and Mixpo have been pushing hard on this front.

I suspect what we’ll see evolve is a segmented marketplace, with different SMBs using different kinds of services at different price points. It seems likely some resellers will soon be pitching fully produced videos and media plans by TurnHere, Denver MultiMedia and Spot Runner, and a second, non-conflicting tier of video enablers, such as Mixpo, BuzzSpot, EZ Show, Spot Runner (again) and now SpotMixer. Eventually, the gap will fill in, right?

Ripple is one of the early leaders in the nascent category of out-of-home advertising. For those unfamiliar, this is rich media advertising that is served with news, weather and sports, at places such as coffee shops and gas pumps.

Most of the companies in this space are serving national display advertising, but Ripple is going for more of a local touch. Cofounder & president of products and technology Ali Diab says popular categories so far have included real estate, where many agents have existing video content and are looking for targeted places to advertise.

Here, geographic and demographic targeting can be effective, depending on where the videos are shown. So far the company has formed deals with chains such as Borders and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, where customers are waiting in line and receptive to things that are more engaging than the back of the person’s head in front of them.

“For a real estate agent, it’s an attractive proposition to show homes in a certain radius of a coffee shop where a demographically specific group of customers are known to be,” says Diab, adding that it also possesses the vanity factor toward which real estate agents have proved to gravitate. Local professional services such as doctors, lawyers and chiropractors could also represent an opportunity here.

More Local Video in More Places

With the increase in local video being produced for online — by virtue of local video channels opening up by IYPs and others — there will be a greater opportunity to repurpose video in these types of places. IYPs will realize that local video should be pushed out beyond their own listings, to live on in other places (such as search engines, as argued) in order to drive the most leads and ROI for their advertisers.

Many of these videos can be as simple as pan & scan montages of still images, set to music and voiceover. Like the self-service dashboards of Mixpo, Pixelfish, EZShow and other video producers, Ripple allows users to create video using stock images and photos, with custom text and voiceover. For the categories mentioned above, Diab argues this can be an inexpensive but effective way to start advertising with video.

In addition to self service, the company is developing other channels to sell video to SMBs, and national advertisers looking to target locally. For the latter, the company has partnered with SeeSaw Networks, an ad network specifically focused on out-of-home inventory. The benefit to advertisers, according to SeeSaw CEO Peter Bowen, is proximity when video is placed in front of customers near the point of purchase, such as a Wal-Mart.

“It’s point of purchase, and it’s also path to purchase,” says Bowen. “Think of your average homemaker filling up the gas tank on the way to the store and seeing an ad for Tide at the gas pump.”

More Local on More Screens

Diab agreed with this scenario and added that coffee shops can be even more effective because consumers are literally standing there and are likely more receptive than if they were pumping gas. But in both scenarios, Diab and Bowen agreed that there is an opportunity to go beyond CPM advertising by integrating calls to action that can further qualify users.

In most cases, this would involve the mobile device, contends Diab, who pictures scenarios such as text prompts or other mobile search activities where users can follow up on an item of interest and receive various promotions or text alerts. The ability to do this makes the medium more effective in not only leading conversions but also tracking them.

The key here is being able to prompt users to interact with a mobile service, given the benefit of having a screen dangled in front of their eyes while they are waiting for their double foam latte. This is similar to the benefit enjoyed by NearbyNow in having its local SMS product search prompted to mall shoppers by signage throughout the malls with which it has formed partnerships.

Both companies, if you think about it, are utilizing a new kind of outdoor advertising as a hook for their product and their ad delivery. Citysearch’s new bar code scan product generally falls into this category as well. Underneath all this are rising standards and open innovation in the mobile world, which will lead to more mainstream adoption of the mobile device as a point of interaction with the online and physical worlds.

All these developing models, including Ripple, bring up interesting possibilities and are telling of the ways the online, offline and mobile worlds are melding. Local media business models going forward need be agnostic toward the medium and deliver content across devices, screens and pulp.

I recently had the chance to talk with Antoine Toffa, founder and CEO of online video platform VideoBloom. Toffa had previously founded Trip.com which was bought by Galileo in 2000 for $326 million and eventually rolled up into what is now Orbitz.

The VideoBloom platform can be used by Web publishers interested in hosting video content. This includes a few different built-in monetization techniques, such as ad overlays. But unlike other video ad platform providers such as Brightcove, it doesn’t require that you join its ad network. The company rather wishes to be a technology provider, unaligned with an ad network, so its addressable market is broader.

“We don’t place the ads,” says Toffa. “People want video to work, and they want it to work simply. And they want to be able to switch potential providers of those [ad] networks. We’re focused on ways to produce, track, distribute and monetize commercial online video.”

What About Local?

Local fits into this equation in the company’s plans to video enable marketplaces and vertical directories in local areas that are conducive to the medium, including real estate, autos and travel. Yellow Pages publishers are also a key target market according to Toffa, who just attended the YPA conference in Las Vegas to sniff out opportunities in the space.

In this way, VideoBloom joins a growing number of video providers that see the opportunity with IYPs and local search sites. So far TurnHere has had the most success cracking this nut because its documentary-style video has gained IYP confidence in salability to local advertisers. But many other formats will fill out this SMB market, as argued last week.

VideoBloom has also taken a look at the online video opportunity by tracking an index of companies that have integrated online video ads. Toffa pointed me to a chart the company devised showing a sample group of DJIA companies that have integrated video. Ninety-three percent have video somewhere on their Web site, while 13 percent have it on the home page and 7 percent don’t have any video.

“Like a lot of other technologies, online video has started with large companies, but then there is a lag before it reaches smaller companies,” said Toffa. “Next we’ll do the same index for Nasdaq companies and see what the results show.”

This trickle-down effect indicates the opportunity still to come for SMB video advertising. This is closely related to the democratization of online video pointed out in last week’s conversation with PixelFish. This will continue to happen as a result of broadband penetration, cultural shifts around things such as YouTube, and a developing online video ecosystem.

IYPs are also a big part of this shift, and by extension SMBs are more directly offered something that has traditionally been out of their grasp. Google TV Ads, examined yesterday, also takes a step toward lowering the barriers for SMBs to advertise with video, and we’ll continue to see more.