With the incredible rapid growth that online video sharing and video search sites are realizing, more and more advertisers are pumping money into video advertising. According to the latest research, online video advertising revenues in the US are expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2012 which is a 72 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years. In 2008, the projections are just shy of $1billion.

Since video sites have been realizing more and more traffic growth, they have had a unique opportunity to innovate and test various different online video ad formats. And the advertisers as well are more than happy to experiment as they are looking to these leaders to develop the most effective online video advertising formats. Traditionally, pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll ad formats (aka in-stream ads) have been favored by advertisers due to the availability of inventory and prominence of the advertisement itself.

Pre-Roll Ads – In this format of advertising, the advertisement clip is inserted before the actual video and while playing the video, the advertisement clip is played first and the viewer is compelled to watch the advertisement before the start of the real video file.

Post-roll Format – In post-roll, just like the other in-stream ad formats, a short clip is played and streamed within the player at the end of the video stream itself. This is not as desired by advertisers as they know that many users never watch a video all the way until the end.

Mid-Roll Format – With mid-rolls, a short clip is streamed in the middle (sometimes every X minutes) of video content that is playing. This tends to be less annoying to users as they are acustomed to this format in television advertising.

As stated earlier, due to the demand, many of these video websites have begun to test and offer new, innovative ad solutions for video. One of these experimental format is the In-Player ad: With in-player ads the player skin itself can be used to place relevant images or text content for the advertiser so that the ad is displayed for the entire time that the video is played.

Contextual in-video advertising seems to be the way of the future with many different sites attempting to match videos with advertisements that are most relevant to the subject matter. Users like this format more as well as it does not disturb the experience of watching the entire video. This quality of the format makes it one of the most promising advertising formats for the future and there are many diverse ways in which to serve either images, clips, or text ads.

Some of the video sites like to go through the video and include only relevant in-video text advertisements, which match the contents of the video and at the same time it does not disturb the process of video watching by the viewer. Youtube was one of the first sites to adopt this format as a standard and it is called Overlay Video Ads.

I have given you a brief overview of the most common formats of video ads that are being tested and utilized at the moment. That being said, with growth being what it is, and video discovery as new as it is, we will certainly see many different companies innovating in regards to developing new and exciting formats for online video advertising.

The root of a quality pay per click campaign is the right keyword list. It’s important to search for and research high quality keywords. Make a long list, and make sure you check out every possible avenue for success.

You may be puzzled about how you can do this. Let us use a keyword like “loan” for our example. This is a well searched keyword. Because it is also very saturated it is hard to get a good placement with it. Extending your keyword research will earn you some better placements.

Think of a different way that your word might be interpreted. For instance, someone searching for the word “loan” might be looking for information on how to get a loan, what do do if their loan is in trouble, how to buy a house, or how to get a good loan with bad credit. Condense these concepts down into keywords that are related to your base keyword. For instance: “bad credit loan”, “house loan”, “getting loan” and “refinancing loan” are all possible options.

All these keywords are small variations on your original keyword. You can research them and find more niche keywords. In fact there are so many different loans to be had. Put these keywords together with your initial list and look at all the different keywords you have made from your original keyword.

You can also start a campaign made up of lenders names. Added to this you can put .com. a country extension or .net at the end of your keyword. It does not matter that there are no domains with that particular keyword; searchers will still use these domain style keywords and you will get some extra visitors.

Do not use saturated keywords that have a lot of competition bidding on them. Find specialized ones that are derived from the primary keyword. Also make different key phrases from one phrase; “loan bad credit” can be taken from “bad credit loan.” Doing this will attract more searchers.

Campaigns and keywords can be created around the different search keywords that your potential buyers will be looking for. It is wise to try all sorts of different keywords and phrases as searchers can use a wide variety of keywords and phrases.

Initially you can use; misspelled words, domain names, products, serial numbers and plurals. Sometimes searchers forget to put spaces in between words and when you use these types of key phrases you can find more traffic.

Use company names and domain names, as well as variations on them. Think about using superlatives like “best” or “cheapest”, and remember that there may be spelling variations in different countries.

You should also use keywords from your web logs. These are good as the stats will show which keywords visitors are using to find your site.

Your pay per click campaign’s success will be dependent on how good your list of keywords is. For this reason you will want to look into all your choices before using your keywords.

I just added a new page to this blog that talks about the Apple Macintosh marketing campaign. It is (in my opinion) a very effective marketing campaign and you should check it out by going to the page.

It is titled: The battle of generations continues…Apple Macintosh vs Microsoft Windows

Check it out and let me know what you think of the campaign!

Mark Garland
AnalyzedMarketing.com