Storybids, Inc. today announced the launch of their product
placement marketplace where online video content creators can get
paid to feature physical products in pre-production user-generated
videos, serial mini-dramas, videoblogs and webisodes. Advertisers may
use Storybids’ searching capabilities to seek
out video creators that meet their demographic criterion such as
viewership, subscriptions, and ratings or by genre or age demographic.
Video creators looking to fund their independent or professional film
projects may now seek out product placement advertising opportunities by
targeting specific advertisers that complement the storyline of future
content. Storybids also works as a social media marketplace for
filmmakers by allowing them to connect with other filmmakers for advice
and collaboration on film projects.
Over two years in the making, Founders Joseph Morin and Juan Prado spent
considerable time conducting research and development for the most
compelling brand entertainment and online video advertising business
model. The two have created a complementary means of monetizing user
generated and professional video. Storybids secured a Series A round of
venture capital financing in August, 2007 from STN Labs of Toronto,
Canada and soft launched a beta marketplace in February of 2008. Based
on a storyboarding concept where video creators would upload storyboard
samples of potential scenes to feature product placement, the website
features the capability to accept any form of digital media such as a
storyboard, images or video as an example for advertisers to peruse for
brand placement opportunities.
A recent research study by Mindshare shows that viewers react negatively
to interruptive TV style ads and attempt to skip them whenever possible
suggesting that consumers are far more receptive to product placement in
online video programming than pre- and post-roll advertising. PQ Media
released a study in February, 2007 that showed spending on branded
entertainment marketing grew 14.7% to an all time high of $22.3 billion
in 2007 and is projected to increase by another 13.9% in 2008 to $25.41
billion driven by product placement, event sponsorship/marketing, and
advergaming/webisodes.
Benefits to the Storybids product placement marketplace include a robust
transaction processing engine where video creators may upload media
available for in-video advertising inventory that is completely
searchable by advertisers and visa-versa where media sellers may search
for specific advertisers complementary to their own video brand.
Storybids also offers distribution and video analytics measurement by
optimizing finalized video for search engines and submitting to several
video hosting sites such as YouTube, MySpaceTV, Veoh, AOL Video,
Metacafe, DailyMotion and others simultaneously allowing dashboard
reporting on the video’s performance via
views, comments and ratings aggregated across the various video sites.
Early in the company’s lifecycle the Storybids
team had some success in promoting a blogger’s
attempt to secure a commercial during Superbowl XLI and created a media
frenzy with the MySuperProposal project, the end result being a wedding
proposal acceptance viral video that was seen over 6 million times
worldwide. CEO Joseph Morin stated, “Given the
Storybids team’s strong background in Internet
advertising and social media marketing, we are uniquely poised to
capture strong market share in this relatively new yet burgeoning
business model. We look forward to serving both video creators and brand
advertisers with a unique video advertising opportunity.”
For more information on Storybids’ unique
advertising model please visit the Storybids
site.
About Storybids
Storybids, Inc. is a venture capital funded start up based in Irvine, CA
focusing on in-video advertisement via product placement in user
generated content as well as professionally scripted webisodes.
Storybids offers a new way to monetize
video by inserting actual product, services or verbal mentions
pre-production before a video goes viral. The videos uploaded via
content creators may be uploaded to multiple video hosting sites at once
and then tracked via analytics for performance via their dashboard. Advertisers
may select video content creators in the marketplace via a search
tool that tracks views, comments and ratings across multiple video
hosting sites. Online at www.storybids.com.
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