• by Joel Lunenfeld , May 13, 2009

Regardless of the industry you're in, times are tough. As so many Americans are focusing on the current economic crisis, the unprecedented wave of foreclosures, the banking meltdown, and the dismal holiday retail sales, the U.S. public is being overwhelmed with more information than we have ever had access to. The U.S. has been through tough times before and none of these themes are necessarily news; however, the major difference today is the digitally connected world we live in and the new interactive marketing tools that are emerging, such as searchable flash videos and voice activated search.

So what does this mean? Despite the downward spiral of spending and confidence, all online indicators of Web traffic (up 9 percent), search volume (up 25 percent year to year), and video streaming (up 63 percent) are growing. Due to this influx, businesses today are spending more and more time on bliptv, Meebo, YouTube, Virtue, and other branded verbs that sound more like veiled sexual innuendo than advertising tactics. This means that companies today need to look to online video advertising, which is estimated to grow by nearly 45 percent over years past (eMarketer).

At a time when accountability and return on investment are more important than ever, search is the strongest vertical within Internet advertising, due to its success-based nature. According to ComScore, the top three Web properties on the Internet are Google, Yahoo, and MSN, respectively. For marketers, this means that in order to get optimal ROI, you must bulk up online video advertising. Companies can do this by creating videos using their products or placing their products within relevant videos. For example, if a marketer works for a branded widget, it's paramount to have that brand of widget used in any online video associated with widgets.

The Internet is made up of millions of Web sites that are coded, tagged, and titled so they can be easily found. A Web site's mission in life is to be discovered, read, and linked to. The semantic Web allows for these sites to be organized and found using search as the vehicle to crawl over all this data and organize it in a manner humans can consume and digest intuitively.

For B2B marketers, flash video search will be an important part of the future of marketing, as searchable flash videos enable more defined, accurate searches, allowing marketers to target specific, detailed audiences. By reaching a fine-tuned audience, marketers will know where to place their advertising, as well as where to include their products and services within embedded video.

Internet users now conduct more searches on YouTube (2.5 billion in August) than they do on Yahoo (2.4 billion), according to ComScore. More than 67 percent of Internet users are viewing video ads at least once a month (eMarketer). As search continues to expand in technology, YouTube's integration of search ads into its homepage makes it all the more clear that search is the golden goose of monetization.

Let's take a look at videos' latest search capabilities. As previously mentioned, most Internet videos are organized and searched based on metadata; text, tags, titles, and descriptions. A search engine basically finds videos based on words associated with it, not the actual content. However, a new search engine, Blinkx , has developed a patented technology that crawls a video's actual content and combines it with the metadata to deliver the most accurate relevant results. The technology spiders the Web, processes each video's audio and visual elements (which is capable of many English accents and other online languages) and breaks the video up into different scenes, similar to a DVD chapter search, with previews for each.

In addition to searchable flash videos, Google is now demoing an audio indexing tool that will basically do speech recognition-Google Audio Indexing. It's currently available for the political channel as a beta, but marketers can expect to see an expansion to other videos. This will allow for a search of videos using a keyword. Also interesting is that with this keyword search, you would be able to go to those specific points in the video.

Over the years, search has evolved from simply a helpful online tool to an activity that is imperative to the way brands communicate. This evolution of technology and the Web has allowed humans to adapt and develop new behaviors to combat century old challenges. As a forward thinking BtoB marketer, the time has come to embrace the power of the Internet and its constantly expanding search capabilities.

Luckily the economic climate is not as bad as it was during the Great Depression and with these new tools at our disposal, hopefully it never will be.