Which Online Video Format Will Prevail?

A nice follow up from yesterday's post about ad networks and ad inventory, today's post from Digital Media Wire offers insight into ad formats.

"Everything on the Internet should be free" is the motto of many consumers, but invasive advertising is a turn-off. Where's the balance? I pulled this quote from later in the DMW post:

“It should feel LIKE free then people will accept it”, said Marc DeBevoise, SVP, Business Development & Strategy, Starz Media Group and pointed to Apple’s iTunes store as a good example of how to sell TV programming.

Via Digital Media Wire

Techcrunch also has a post today about Google's latest attempts to marry targeted advertising with contextual search. Techcrunch says the 850 pound gorilla needs to fix its "MySpace problem." The problem is that social sites are highly demographic and don't play by traditional search rules that Google has grown itself on. So last Friday, Google had this announcement on Inside Adwords: "Today we're announcing that demographic bidding is now available for all AdWords advertisers." Techcrunch analysis:

As of last Friday, advertisers could target their ads by age or gender on 31 participating sites in Google’s ad network that provide such information. The most noteworthy ones are MySpace, Friendster, and YouTube. The rest, with a few exceptions, aren’t exactly the type of sites that big advertisers clamor for, so this isn’t going to have a big immediate impact. (Here is a list of the participating sites). AdWords already lets advertisers target demographically by site, taking generalized demographic data for entire sites from comScore. But this is different because it allows targeting by individual user.

This would be the oft-sought after "Holy Grail" and if anyone can do it, it's GOOG.

Via Inside AdWords
Via Techcrunch