After the past year of experiments with online marketing video, some winning formats have emerged. One may surprise you — the long-form webinar. (masshightech.com)

A webinar is, as expected, an online seminar. It is a specific type of web conference, typically one way and a webinar can be collaborative.

Interesting is that webinars seem to be very effective for marketing purposes. This is interesting because it is in line with the bigger trend of delivering relevance and content to customers in stead of the old fashion disturbing tactics.

So when you think about making an online video. Think about being relevant and think further than Youtube alone. Howcast for example is only for How-to video’s.

Youtube is testing mobile advertising starting in the U.S. and Japan.

On the Google Mobile Blog they say the following:

YouTube for mobile continues to grow exponentially, and today, people watch hundreds of millions of YouTube videos every month on mobile devices.

At YouTube, we are constantly testing new ways to deliver the kinds of ads that contribute to the user experience while making the most sense for advertisers, and we’ve learned a lot about what works for YouTube and what doesn’t. We’re excited to explore new approaches to mobile advertising, and will evaluate this test closely over the next several weeks…

Want to know more about the mobile user experience?

-Keep checking Google mobile blog

-or check my older post about Mobile marketing

Tubemogul.com comes with an easy but interesting report on online video viewing. By answering two simple questions:

• Where do you get most video views?
• and how do different categories score?

You get a good idea of which video portals are important for which video category. (For the US market at least.)

For distribution within specific topics you can look for services like propertypreviews.com. PropertyPreview is an online video niche distributor. You can upload your video (or picture) and they will place it in real real estate listings etc..

Youtube is getting more functions. It gives us, users, more and more control and insights. Now there is this new feature in beta, Annotations.

• Explanation here
• Video instruction here

So you can now ad text in after uploading. I don’t see the whole point yet. Why not ad in text while making the video? But I think this is just the beginning of opening up video content to, for example, customers. And I guess this is just one step in the direction of easy self made interactive video’s. Just watching video’s is coming to an end.

I see now… That some interactivity is already possible right now since you can put in links to other youtube pages. Check out this demo.

(thanks to Dutchcowboys.nl)

To get some inspiration it is always nice to look at award winning campaigns. This week I found the Webby awards in New York and the Belgian Cyber Lions Awards.

With the Webby Awards, NYtimes.com was the big winner also for the NYT style magazine video’s. The Obama “Yes We Can” video-clip is a winner. And The Onion wins seven awards for their webvideo’s and podcasts. (thank’s to webwereld.nl).

I think we can conclude that video is becoming really important these days. In this respect I like to get some special attention for Viva la Creation! (also a webby winner). It is a video remix project. With their tool called jumpcut, anybody can remix video.

When video remixing gets mainstream think about the possibilities for user generated content but also about again losing brand control. Anybody can take your video-commercial and make his/her own version.