aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Inside AdWords, Google’s official source for information about AdWords, has been trumpeting the arrival of Click-to-play video ads for AdWords. Yippy Skippy I woke up this morning to find the new video ad serving features in our AdWords client manager account interface!

Video (and image) ads now appear on a high number of Google content match affiliate sites and for goods in the Google Network. Google video ads do not appear in organic SERPS (at least for now). Content provider affiliate websites must opt-in to the image ads program and only then are site’s eligible for video ads. Affiliate content providers are provided with tools to choose preset display formats for ad sizes and shapes to display. It’s only a question of time before these ads are served to cable networks, hotel rooms, satellite TV, and other broadcast streams.

What are Video Ads?
Video ads are first displayed as a static display picture. When a customer clicks the play button (or the placeholder image), the video starts to play by one of two methods:Read the rest of this entry »

NAB 1997
It was about 10 years ago or so that I was walking the floor at NAB. Everywhere the word “convergence” was being tossed around faster than the poker chips over at Caesars. Back then, no one was fully aware of what it meant. Somehow, technologies were going to seamlessly merge and create a utopian world for the user. Trouble was everyone had a different idea of how that world would look and feel and more importantly, how it would be accessed.

Some thought it would come through to your eyes on the good old TV. Some thought the PC was going to morph into the new electronic hearth. Now bring cell phones, game consoles, and portable video devices into the mix making the combo platters of content delivery endless and globally available. Will the delivery of content be a convergence or a collision?Read the rest of this entry »

I am pleased to announce a new series of articles regarding the convergence and consolidation of media channels. Since traditional channels like broadcast, print, and cable are folding into the Internet at an ever increasing rate this topic has become incredibly relevant. Like everyone else in my age group (don’t ask don’t tell) most of my associates come from a different era of marketing, public relations, PR, advertising and we’re all reacting from our unique personal and professional vantage points. We have similar questions which range from theoretical debate to matters of survival or forced obsolescence.

SEM and “Traditional” Television Can Learn From Each Other.
Anyway among my associates I have a dialog going with the good folks at Charter Communications. Peter Provost, Sales Manager of Charter Communications in Duluth, Minnesota, has been educating me about the daily authority blogs he reads in the broadcast and cable television world. He’s turned me on to publications which are not common fodder in the SEM universe like MediaPost Raw and Online Spin. In turn I have been channeling Peter the authority blogs I read every day like Search Engine Land and SEO Roundtable. I like the exchange of ideas from different perspectives from media players speeding towards the same destination from opposite directions.Read the rest of this entry »

With the proliferation of user generated media beginning to saturate sites like YouTube brands can’t count on control anymore. The question is what to do about it.

Real like a Heart Attack
Like it or not YouTube users create commercials for brand products every day in droves. The commercials, which are sometimes negative, bastardize and segment brands into little pieces that will keep you up late at night as 450,000 potential customers download the latest pro or con rant about your product.

Take this YouTube search for Chevy Truck which returns pages upon pages of user generated media about any twisted aspect of the brand. I like the video where an emotional male shares the experience of shepherding his truck over the 250K mile mark. Ask yourself how this ad might affect a potential Chevy customer.

Compare this how Honda might feel about this video of a Honda Odyssey burning on the freeway. Read the rest of this entry »

The panelists in the SES Video Optimization seminar, Eric Papczun, Sherwood Stranieri,  Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative stressed the growing strength of properly tagged video content on the regular search engines.

To drive this home they shared some brand-related keywords turning up in “normal” Google SERPs within view of consumers. Given the investment most large companies make in branding, it’s a no longer optional  as the whether a company monitors and defends the SERPs video results. I have some large clients who would would fall over dead to discover such an uncontrollable subversion of the brand.

Below I show the keyword, search frequency annually (Trellian Global Database), how many documents were returned, and how many documents contained all of the keywords in their title tag.  Take a careful look. Some of the keyword spaces are relativly uncontested (with  different scales of search volume). Other keyword spaces could be a more serious undertaking to increase your rank for.

I would like to note that in nearly every search I undertook in orginizing this post, I found wikipedia.com results ranking higher than video. If any of you bloggers would be interested in sharing faciniating links, feel free to comment with SERPs for video in normal search engines. youTube is not the only game in town so it would be fun to hear about long tail results from smaller video sites.

Beyoncé
Annual searches: 1,168,180 (Trellian Global DB annual searches)
23,800,000 documents for beyonce
636,000 for allintitle
Google page 2

CSI Miami
Annual searches: searches 79,787
1,870,000 dcuments for csi miami.
allintitle:”csi miami”
Google page 1Read the rest of this entry »

SES New York 2007 Day 1
It’s been quite a morning. I was here yesterday for Jennifer Laycock’s  presentation on viral link baiting and viral marketing. It was an intensive half day class from an accomplished presenter.

The morning started early when I nearly stumbled upon Danny Sullivan whom I had never met. I read his posts in Search Engine Land every day as the most immediate source for search related topics. He’s a gracious guy who chatted for a moment before moving along.

On the Multimedia & Mobile Track the first session I attended regarded Video Search Optimization. I found reinforcement for the methodology aimClear brings our clients marketing video content.  We preach that it’s important to keep in mind, when targeting search engines that specialize in gathering up your video, to remember the inclusion of well optimized meta text. This makes content more available to searchers seeking content. The session looked at how to make videos more discoverable in these specialized search spaces. There was also a good amount of focus on making viral campaigns contribute to the authority of your website.Read the rest of this entry »

Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC announced today during an SES NYC 2007 session  that in “3rd or “4th” quarter Infuse Creative will release a commercial build of their proprietary Video SEO software.  Infuse Creative’s optimization team presently uses this software in-house to batch the video submission and tracking process to numerous video engines.

The Infuse website defines the company as such: “Infuse Creative, LLC employs the latest state of the art search engine marketing technologies and methodologies to lead generation, ecommerce, and branding/awareness clients via full service search engine marketing & Internet marketing services…”Read the rest of this entry »