Here’s a look at the contests:

1. Staples’ “Give Your Small Business the Push it Needs.” To enter, contestants must submit a 15-second video about their business on Staples’ Facebook page. In order to win, each business must get the most votes for their video. Staples offers the winning five businesses up to $50,000 in free television advertising in a Staples ad or $40,000 in free advertising and $10,000 in cash each. Winners also get $500 in Staples merchandise and services. Deadline is March 14.

2. Wal-Mart’s “Get on the Shelf.” The world’s largest retailer is offering the winner of this contest an opportunity to have its product sold in Wal-Mart stores and Walmart.com. In addition, the winner will receive marketing help and assistance in scaling production to meet the retail giant’s demand. To enter, contestants must submit a video via YouTube. Deadline is Feb. 22.

3. Facebook’s “Small Business Boost.” While some companies are using Facebook as a contest platform, the social media network itself is offering tiered prizes in its SMB contest. The 10 U.S.-based businesses that can drive the most “likes” to their Facebook business pages by April 1 will receive up to $10,000 in free advertising. Smaller prizes include receiving $50 in free Facebook advertising for attracting 50 Facebook “likes” before the April 1 deadline. Winners with 100 “likes” on their business pages will receive a $100 ad credit.

According to additional data from Compete and Google, we’ll continue to see B2B companies duke it out in paid search. Their report cites 73 percent of U.S. B2B execs used an online search engine last June to conduct purchase research.

In addition, the study also revealed more reliance on video. Google and Compete polled more than 1,600 U.S. execs and tracked the online activity of U.S. Web users both to and from selected B2B websites. Between February 2010 and March 2011, B2B-branded YouTube searches doubled.

Recently, Yelp posted a video on its business blog of SMB advertising success stories. Time will tell if we’ll see more brands using video content to share product-specific information, demos and testimonials.

The focus for vertical sites is likely to shift in coming months. In addition to regular features, such as listings, many vertical sites will also begin to blend personalized or on-demand “maintenance” information with various social media features such as scheduling and reviews.

We’ve seen it with garden and health sites, and also, increasingly, with car maintenance sites. DriverSide and RepairPal, both launched in 2008, have pioneered the personalized garage approach, which links car owners with auto diagnosis and leads to service providers.

A new site, CarCareKiosk, targets DIYs — Do It Yourselfers. Founder Hans Angermeier, a former investment banker, has developed the site to provide car owners with “how to” videos that are specific to their car make. AT&T/Compete research shows that “How to” videos are major drivers for vertical sites. The site now has 8,000 car repair videos in its library.

Based in Milwaukee, CarCareKiosk has a team of seven who work with new and used car dealers to contribute videos on everything from how to check your own oil to changing the cabin air filter. “Every car is quite different — the cabin air filter on one car might be behind the glove box on one model, but in a completely different place on another car,” says Angermeier.

CarCareKiosk currently has a PayPal “donate” button for support the site, but Angermeier says he expects to sell some search-based advertising. There is also a directory for finding local mechanics, a la RepairPal and DriverSide, but that is just at a starting phase. The real target is used parts manufacturers. Sites such as eBay Motors are stores onto themselves.

He cites research showing that used parts will account for $43 billion in sales in 2012 and $47 billion in 2013. The poor economy might be contributing to people keeping older cars and maintaining them, and also doing their own work, he suggests.

While this news has been out for a little while, we thought it was interesting that a company with powerful TV assets would initiate a deal with a company that provides high-quality, affordable video commercial content for local advertisers. After all, isn’t this what TV has been doing since the ’40s. What gives?

Anyone who’s ever sold or sold against TV operators knows the costs of commercial production can be a deal killer. TV sales executives try their hardest to find ways to bury the costs of production in their schedules, but that doesn’t always work. Other media reps also understand the process and sell against TV by scaring local advertisers about those production costs. It’s been going on forever. 

So, what’s new? TV stations are now involved in many more multiplatform selling opportunities than ever, and Fisher Communications is no exception. Video is a critical and highly seductive element in the minds of most advertisers and an enormously effective advertising tool whether used on air or online. Simply put, local production houses are not equipped to scale to meet the new demand for on-air and online video. The turnaround time and costs associated with doing local production are burdens for both the station and advertiser. The Fisher deal with SpotMixer allows their sales teams to put commercials together on their connected devices right in the showroom of the advertiser, if needed. 

For years, newspaper and radio reps have always been instructed about the power of the spec ad to close a deal. With this arrangement, TV and online reps working for Fisher have the same power at their disposal without costing the station thousands of dollars in time and effort, while providing a video that any business owner would be pleased to have carry his or her brand and identity.

Further, this lower cost option allows Fisher to extend the power of video to a lot of smaller local clients that might have had “video envy” over the years. Other local media companies have also been tying up with video providers over the past few years, but this is clearly local TV’s space to defend.

Internet display and text advertising are great. But nothing really matches video for engagement and open rates. A number of players are specializing in SMB video. A new company, Webshoz (pronounced “Web shows”) is focused on presenting an onscreen “bar” of several video choices that viewers can click “video previews” on demand.

The application, which was built by Placelinks, may be used for national services (i.e., showing 5 top movies for DirectTV). But CEO Alexandrea Day anticipates several possible uses for local players, who can be targeted based on the user’s IP address and also provides a full set of analytics.

Real estate brokerages, for instance, can highlight specific homes in the first three video segments, and an agent in the fourth based on location. A major brokerage like Century 21 can use the service’s dynamic rotation to integrate any of its thousands of agents.

Similarly, insurance companies (i.e., State Farm) can highlight several types of insurance products in the first few frames, and introduce a video for the local franchise holder in the fourth. Travel is also envisioned as a key local application, and could even tie video previews with daily deals. “Every hotel has a video and wants to make a deal,” says Day.

Day notes that Webshoz launched 15 months ago with angel funding, and has a patent pending on its technology. She says that average videos are viewed about 15 seconds.

Pixelfish, armed with $3.5 million round of new capital raised since October, is evolving its model from a white-label provider of affordable SMB video to a destination site for SMB offers. Today, it announced that it has acquired Steve Espinosa’s Backyard/CitySquares to act as its infrastructure.

Pixelfish was founded in 2006 and has recently settled on a model that reclassifies SMB video. Its partners include Yellowbook and Jivox.

“Combining Backyard’s revolutionary technology with Pixelfish’s software-as-a-service video creation, distribution and tracking application allows us to deliver immense value for local advertisers and consumers,” said Pixelfish CEO John McIntyre, in a release. “We know what video ads work best where for each local business.”

Backyard, a new start-up, has been ramping up quickly. It has 500,000 unique visitors in the suburban Southern California areas of Orange County and Riverside County after just a few months. It acquired Ben Saren’s CitySquares in December, and has launched an intense telemarketing-based effort.

The company is headquartered in Temecula, 50 miles north of San Diego. The new entity will be known under the CitySquares brand (it owns the www.citysquares.com, but not backyard.com. It has been using bckyrd.com, Svngr-style.)

It will have 50 employees, including 20 from Backyard, and will soon be moving into a new 12,000-square-foot facility, says Espinosa. Pixelfish, however, will retain its Torrance, California, office near Los Angeles, and its separate business.

With Pixelfish’s backing in hand, Backyard/CitySquares will be hitting affluent neighborhoods in major metro markets by April, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It will also be launching partnerships with major media companies, initially focusing on newspapers, says Espinosa, who will be the company’s CTO (and a significant shareholder in the merged enterprises).

While terms of the sale were not disclosed, it is said to be in the range of $3 million to $5 million, consisting of cash and stock. Backyard’s angel investors included Dave McClure from 500 Startups, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jason Calacanis.

Webshoz, a new company, has developed a product called the Videobar that offers publishers a way to drive more views to online videos while generating more revenues from advertisers.

The basic idea behind the Videobar is to take six videos from within the directory and present them on the Videobar, which is essentially a horizontal display ad. Users can view the videos in thumbnail form within the bar by rolling over them. Or they can click to go to that advertiser’s landing page.

Frank Rocco, Webshoz VP of sales and marketing, told us there are three elements to the Videobar value proposition:

* An increasing number of plays for online videos.
* More exposure and leads for advertisers.
* An additional revenue opportunity for publishers.

There would appear to be an opportunity to distribute the Videobar to other sites to generate leads from outside the IYP as well.

Rocco says Webshoz is looking to license the Videobar to publishers on a rev share basis. The company offers free video production as part of its service, but that is more table stakes than a USP.  The Videobar (which Rocco duly notes is patent pending) itself is what makes Webshoz new and different.

Webshoz has worked with Placelinks to develop its customer dashboard and tracking and reporting system.

Webshoz has a trial of the product under way with SureWest, which operates its IYP on the Innovectra platform.

Roku Channel Store

With cable subscriptions declining and a host of nonlinear, IP-connected devices emerging to offer new, incremental revenue possibilities, the time has come for local TV to get serious about an OTT strategy. To capitalize on this opportunity at a market level, local operators should be asking, “what does an effective OTT strategy entail?” and “what steps can be taken today?”

Roku, an OTT set-top box provider with an open application environment and channel store for content developers to build on, is probing these same questions and thinks it may have the answer. Partnerships, curated content, revised workflow and advertising are all part of the solution.

Roku’s channel store already features a growing swath of audio and video content, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, MLB.TV, the NHL, Pandora and Roku Newscaster, which culls together a cross-section of news from national outlets. While sports and entertainment/drama are particularly appealing, Jim Funk, Roku’s VP of business development, told BIA/Kelsey that customers of the channel store have demonstrated “lots of interest in local stations.”

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October U.S. online video rankings from comScore reaffirm an established trend: Watching video online is a social exercise. Fueled by YouTube’s stranglehold on unique viewers, viewing sessions and minutes per viewer, Google posted dominant numbers, besting its closest competitor — Yahoo sites — by almost 93 million UVs and 1.7 billion viewing sessions. In total, YouTube accounted for 37 percent of all viewing sessions, with viewers averaging a staggering 271.6 minutes, or 4.5 hours, for the month.

Facebook, while seeing slight declines from September, still ranked fifth in total UVs with more than 47 million. That number gave it a larger viewer base than AOL, Microsoft and Fox Interactive Media.

Hulu, while tenth in UVs, placed third in minutes per viewing. The online video joint venture also served up the most video ads (4.6 billion) and enjoyed a robust 34 ads-per-viewer ratio. Google finished tenth in total video ads, even as it practically monopolized the viewing public.

All told, 84 percent of the U.S. Internet audience watched online video in October, and 45 percent of the total population was exposed to video ads.

In July, BIA/Kelsey projected that OTT homes — or those services providing linear and nonlinear video services over third-party bandwidth to the TV — will exceed cable homes by 2013. A February IMS Research report on “Internet Video to the TV” pegged 78 percent global growth in OTT devices, with 25 percent of American households able to display Internet video on TVs.

After a flurry of new releases and partnership agreements, device makers, middleware companies and content providers are catching up to — and justifying — these forecasts.

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