Online Video: The Work is Just Beginning

If you believe the forecasters, 2010 will be the year of the long-awaited inflection point when TV budgets begin to shift to online video in a meaningful way.  In 2009, advertisers are projected to spend $699 million on online video ads, an increase of 32% from last year, “outpacing growth rates for most other emerging media platforms,” according to a forecast from Brian Wieser, Global Director of Forecasting for Magna. Jack Myers says that online video advertising will increase by 115% to $968 million in 2009 and is forecasting it to be the fastest growing segment of the media industry through 2012, when it is expected to hit nearly $5 billion.

Read More: MediaPost 

In A Year When Online Ads Slumped, Video Egg Doubled Revenues

Last year was the first time the online advertising industry saw a slump in revenues (JP Morgan is estimating a 5.2 percent decline, although things looked like they started to stabilize in the third quarter). But for online advertising network VideoEgg, 2009 was a great year. According to CEO Matt Sanchez, the company “more than doubled” revenues to $25 million last year and reached profitability seven months ago.

Read More: Washington Post

Social Science Meets Computer Science at Yahoo!

Shortly after Carol Bartz took over as chief executive of Yahoo Inc. early last year, she met with Prabhakar Raghavan for an overview of the Sunnyvale Web giant’s research division. As the head of Yahoo Labs ran through the catalog of computer scientists on staff, Bartz turned to him and asked: “Where are your psychologists?” Raghavan was stunned the newly installed CEO had so quickly gotten to a question he’d been asking for years. His answer was they didn’t have enough. That’s changing. In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it’s still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

Read More: SF Gate

Martha, Forbes, ESPN Among Top Online CPMs

The supposed decline and fall of display advertising notwithstanding, brand (and a bit of reach) still matters to premium advertisers. According to a revealing look at some of the most valuable real estate online from AdAge’s Michael Learmonth, familiar offline brands still can rival the big Internet portals.  That Wall Street Journal “News Hub” of short video updates that was launched several months ago is part of a winning strategy at the Dow Jones site, garnering CPM rates of $75 to $100. Learmonth polled agencies and media buyers about where their money is going, and apparently WSJ hasn’t made a video that advertisers don’t like.

Read More: Minonline

Social Network Spending Shifts

2009 will end with major shifts in social network advertising spending. Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace.

Read More: eMarketer

comScore Announces New Measurement Tool for CPG Brands

comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced a new solution, in conjunction with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), that measures the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns in building sales of CPG brands in supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchants, convenience stores and other retail channels that are important to the CPG industry. The solution uses IRI’s Consumer Network(TM) household purchase panel to measure retail sales in all channels along with comScore’s ability to understand which panelists were exposed to online advertising. The solution will be integrated into comScore’s AdEffx(TM) suite of products that provides media planners with all the tools they need to maximize the ROI from their online ad campaigns, ranging from data for improved planning through to tools for smarter buying and finally the channel-wide measurement of campaign ROI that are the focus of this new service.

Read More: PR Newswire