Video Contest Hub
The Intersection of
Video & Opportunity

 Kelsey Group was kind enough to give me a media pass for the conference, and I am here listening to all the great inspiring stories of innovative new local advertising services. 

There are tons of video advertising companies here - Adfare, Jivox, Mixpo, PointRoll, Spotrunner, Spotzer, TurnHere, and many others.  This is a jackpot for networking with the online video advertising business.  The other major group here is Yellow Pages and newspapers, who have the best sales networks for reaching local businesses. 

Yahoo and 800 newspapers are working together to sell online/offline packages and are having great success with small and mid-sized local businesses.  Now Yellowbook has announced that it has formed a partnership with YouTube to use it as an auxiliary distribution source for the SMB videos it produces. This essentially gives it broader distribution beyond its own walls (Yellowbook.com).

This is good for Yellowbook’s growing crop of video advertisers because it gives them more places to be found. In other words, videos in YouTube have a greater chance of being picked up in search engine results (especially Google). This marriage of video and search engine optimization is very valuable to advertisers.

This will gain steam as more and more local businesses realize the lowered barriers to advertising with video, and as more and more local media organizations (Yellow Pages and newspapers) deliver it to them. This is a key theme of Kelsey Group’s recently released local video forecast.

For Yellowbook this is the latest in a string of forward-thinking moves under Chief New Media Officer Pat Marshall. It should make its SMB video offering that much more enticing to small-business advertisers.

Generally, the conversation in local video is evolving beyond who shoots the video and how it’s done to questions of where it shows up and how it targets the right local users. Distribution will be key.

This will continue to happen through distribution partners like YouTube, local ad networks and vertical search partners. The latter has seen a great deal of action, including Mixpo’s partnerships with lots of real estate sites and TurnHere’s many partnerships with national hotel chains and IYPs.

See more from the Kelsey Group Blogs here

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