Video Search Worlds Collide

by David Berkowitz, Tuesday, October 2, 2007

VIDEO SEARCH OPTIMIZATION AND advertising worlds have collided, and
the big bangs bursting forth will shape the video marketing landscape
for years to come.

The audience at last week's OMMA panel "Video Search Optimization:
Prime Time for Prime Positioning" got a taste of what's happening
thanks to the four engaging speakers from Blinkx, Viewdle, ScanScout,
and VeoTag. It was the perfect embodiment of the "Worlds Collide"
theme of the entire OMMA event.

Here's a glimpse into the worlds of the four presenters from the panel:

Blinkx: Jay Prasad, director of strategy & business development

Blinkx, perhaps the best known brand in video search today, shared its
boldest claim right on the title slide of its presentation, calling
itself "the new way to watch TV." Given how many options there are
for viewing TV online or on a mobile or portable device, and given
that most TV is viewed on a TV, I'd be reluctant to call any online
technology "the new way" to watch, but it does point to Blinkx's
ambitions beyond just search.

While Blinkx is taking a leadership position with video search
optimization thanks to resources such as its white paper on video SEO,
it's also rolling out an ad network, AdHoc. Blinkx uses its search
technology, including speech-to-text indexing and visual analysis (it
can recognize brand logos within videos) to contextually target video
ads in a range of formats. This hints at a new trend: If you have
search technology, the ad targeting will follow.

Viewdle: Barry Schiffman, co-founder and senior vice president,
strategic alliances.

Viewdle's focuses on one specific challenge of video search -- facial
recognition -- and it's now in a live beta test in Reuters Labs.
There, you can search Reuters videos for names of celebrities or
news-making politicians such as Angelina Jolie, Angela Merkel, and Ang
Lee, to name a few. The Merkel search brings up eight listings,
including one for the news story from Reuters Germany, "Merkel und
Sarkozy beraten über Finanzmarktkrise," and you can click to see not
just the exact spot where the chancellor of Germany appears, but also
each segment featuring the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy.

While Viewdle's current focus is on licensing its technology to
increase user engagement on publishers' sites, it also plans to debut
advertising offerings, along with a consumer-facing destination of its
own.

ScanScout: Waikit Lau, co-founder and president

Rather than bill itself as "the new way to watch TV," ScanScout's site
says it offers "a glimpse into the future of digital television."
ScanScout developed video search technology, but unlike Blinkx and
Viewdle, ScanScout has been solely committed to the ad network model.
As is de rigueur these days, ScanScout's ad formats are tickers and
overlays, which can open videos or other more engaging formats above
the ad or in an accompanying window. Ads can be targeted to the
keyword uttered in a clip, an option not available with comparable
formats on YouTube. Here, ScanScout draws inspiration from the AdWords
model in a way that Google hasn't come close to applying on its own.
This perfectly mirrors the Blinkx ad network, which framed itself as
an evolution of Google's AdSense contextual network.

VeoTag: Scott Rhodes, CEO

VeoTag, unlike others on the panel, is purely focused on making online
videos more accessible by making them easier to navigate and then
easier to find in search engines. Anyone can tag an audio or video
clip, basically creating a table of contents with whatever degree of
detail is desired. Search engines can then index the tags; without the
tags, this content would have probably been invisible to the
mainstream engines.

You can find examples of how the videos rank in search engines by
perusing the library of tagged clips on VeoTag's site and then
searching for keyword phrases. For instance, say you remember hearing
or reading the phrase "most PR is spam" somewhere. A search for it in
quotes will bring you to Paul Dunay's blog, where he shares a podcast
of his interview with author David Meerman Scott. Other searches lead
directly to the tagged segment of the video, such as this demo Scott
Rhodes shared for "swiftkids dora." VeoTag fits into the collision
theme, albeit from a different angle. It's more from the classic SEO
standpoint of a site's editor using VeoTag to drive traffic to the
site, so the editor winds up playing a clutch role on the marketing
team.

Collision Course

Throughout OMMA, every one of the search marketing tracks exemplified
how Worlds Collide. Two panels touched on the melding disciplines of
social media marketing and search engine optimization. One panel
simultaneously tackled local search and mobile search, while another
discussed the confluence of SEO and paid search. OMMA's last search
session featured a slew of case studies on how marketers are using
search and display advertising together. In that last panel, an
audience member shared that he's been working with display advertising
for years and has been waiting to see real examples of the two types
of media being used together. His dream was realized.

These are all big bangs. The marketer tasked with using one of the
most traditional of channels, the Yellow Pages, must simultaneously
pursue the next frontier of mobile marketing. The marketer trained to
monitor conversions from keyword-triggered search ads must embed the
best keywords in widgets for search engine optimization. The marketer
ensuring that videos on a site rank well in search engines must broker
media buys on other video sites and networks. Tectonic plates are
shifting, land masses are changing, and worlds are colliding in chain
reactions. Harness the energy created. The alternative -- to return to
a complacent equilibrium -- is untenable today. BANG.