Adélie Studios, a provider of animated marketing videos and tutorial animations, has received the 2010 All Star Award from Constant Contact®, Inc., the trusted marketing advisor to more than 400,000 small organizations worldwide. Adélie Studios is one of Constant Contact’s 2010 top business partners and most prolific user of its tools, whether within Constant Contact’s email marketing, event marketing, social media marketing or survey products – or a combination of all four.

“We’re pleased to be recognized by Constant Contact for helping our customers achieve higher click through rates through integrating video into our customers email marketing strategy,” said Eric Guerin, owner of Adélie Studios. “Our customers utilizing email marketing with video were able to garner a response rate that was on average 10x higher than direct mail and nearly double their click through rate when video content was included. Constant Contact’s services played a big part in helping our customers achieve those engagement goals.”

Constant Contact looked at criteria including the following when selecting this year’s All Stars:

• Frequency of campaigns, events and surveys
• Open, bounce and click through rates
• Usage of social features
• Mailing list sign up tools
• Use of reporting tools

“We work hard to listen to our customers, and we use that feedback to create products and services designed to help them better engage with their customers and prospects,” said Gail Goodman, chairman, president and CEO of Constant Contact. “The Constant Contact All Star Awards are our way of recognizing our customers that have successfully used Constant Contact to market their companies. We have some of the most committed, passionate customers out there and we’re proud we can be a part of their continued success.”

After over two years of rumors and threatening, Google finally “officially” pulled the plug over the weekend on its Google Video service. All users who had uploaded videos to the service received an email stating that playback of video content on Google Video will end on April 29. The move will affect only videos hosted on the site, not the popular video search engine tool.

Since its creation in 2005, Google video was a video sharing site very similar in concept to YouTube. Which is obviously why they bought YouTube the following year. Since Google Video ceased uploads in 2009, it has settled in to be more of a search tool for video discovery. This redirection to search is reflected in the email message sent from Google this past weekend:

“We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.”

What does this mean to you?

If you have content on Google Video, download instructions are included in the email they sent out to users.  They also encourage you to move the content over to YouTube (big surprise) and give you until May 13th, 2011 to retrieve any videos you may have uploaded to Google Video.

If you do not have videos hosted on Google Video, absolutely nothing will change. It will be interesting to see how and what they have in store for search on Google Video. Will it be to further augment content discovery? Will any developments drastically affect how online videos will need to be search engine optimized in the future? Will it develop some sort of video advertising platform that works intuitively with how people consume content online?

My guess is if search is how they are going to “officially” focus the site, then drastic changes may be coming soon. Time will tell.

Originally published on the Inane Ramblings of Eric Guerin Blog.

This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is an animated video created by HubSpot for the “Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One“.

Full Disclosure: I may be a bit biased here since I was the writer and animator on this project. While I tend to be hyper-critical of my work (is any creative person not?) I am more impressed with the strategy behind the branding video carried out by HubSpot.

They didn’t just create the video and throw it out to the whims of the internet, they had a plan. In the word’s of the Episode “Guru” of David Meerman Scott “Create exceptional content that people will want to share, and point the world to your virtual doorstep.”

So the video was posted on their blog, they built a custom landing page for the series to reside (oh yes…there will be more), started a fan page on Facebook and launched a Twitter account for Captain Inbound. Practicing what they are preaching. The video was also mentioned as a great example of how “Content Rules” on the MarketingProfs blog today by Ann Handley. Enjoy!

Eric Guerin of Adelie Studios, an industry leader in online marketing animated video production, and Heather Riley of SmartMarket Media were honored as recipients of a Telly Award in the professional services category for their short online video animation developed for JCSI (a recruitment consulting company specializing in sourcing and screening passive candidates) The video was selected from thousands of entries for its entertainment and originality.

“Winning a Telly Award is a wonderful affirmation of the quality of work we bring to animation projects,” said Eric Guerin of Adelie Studios. “Knowing that the competition is judged by some of the best industry professionals lets us know our creative direction and leadership in online animated video production is appreciated not only by our customers but also by some of the finest producers working today.”

Founded in 1978, the Telly Awards is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest video and film productions, and online film and video. The Telly Awards annually showcases the best work of the most respected advertising agencies, production companies, television stations, cable operators, interactive agencies, and corporate video departments in the world.

This year, the Telly Awards received over 11,000 entries from all 50 states and countries around the world. Silver and bronze statuettes are awarded based on creativity and outstanding achievement in a specific category.

Have you considered Facebook video advertising units as part of your online video marketing strategy? If you haven’t (or didn’t know it was an option) here’s some statistics to consider.

TubeMogul just released a recent report analyzing Facebook Video Advertising where they took a look at 25 major video advertising campaigns that ran identical videos within Facebook ad units and also ran similar click-to-play video ad units on various publisher sites. The sample compared resulting cost, viewing-time and  spans over 60 million cumulative views. Here are some important findings from their report with some of my own opinions intertwined in their results:

Why should you care about video on Facebook?

Facebook is one of the top-ten video sites in the world without even trying to be. According to a report by Comscore, Facebook was the 5th largest video site in April in total videos played coming in above dedicated video sites like CBS Interactive and even Hulu.

According to the study done by TubeMogul, Facebook also delivers some of the most engaged viewers online. Their study found that Facebook leads all other discovery sources in terms of minutes-watched per view.

Overall, it found that completion rates for Facebook ads were roughly 5.5% to 9.5% higher than identical videos run in display units on outside publisher sites. The Facebook virtual currency (or in-game video ad) also had the longest average view time, at 54.7 seconds per view, followed by the Facebook in-banner, at 48.6 seconds, the third-party in-banner, 39.6, and the Facebook interstitial (i.e. preroll video ads), at 11.2.

It’s no surprise to me that the interstitials had the shortest view time because most viewers if given the option to skip them and get to the content they were originally trying to get to…will skip them. Even though in most cases they are much shorter than any of the other video ad formats here.

3/4 of Facebook ad units sampled have a lower average cost per view than comparable offsite display. Virtual currency ads were also the big winner here at 30 cents on a cost-per-view basis. That compares to $5.27 for Facebook app in-banner ads, $1.06 for Facebook’s sponsored video unit, and $1.07 for stand-alone video ads on other sites.

Other interesting stats

Viewers were more likely to share videos in Facebook’s virtual currency and app in-banner ads with friends on Facebook or Twitter at 1.5% – 2% than video ads on other sites which were less than ½% for offsite video ads.

The click-through rate on the virtual currency ad was also highest, at 5%, versus just over 3% for video display ads on third-party sites.

Herein lies a problem for marketers

So you may be thinking “Wow you get a lot of bang for your buck with the virtual currency, where do I sign up?” Not quite so fast. While social games like Farmville have a monthly audience of over 70 million this may not be the right demographic for your product, service or brand. So research the social game carefully before placing a video ad campaign. Also be wary that many of these game developers break the rules and allow gamers to click play on a video ad multiple times just to rack up points.

So while the numbers may look impressive make sure you know your audience and research the game first. Is the virtual currency model in gaming the next big thing for video advertising? Are you REALLY getting an engaged viewer or are they just clicking through because they think that will earn them more points? What do you think?