• BusinessWeek/Online Media Daily, Tuesday, January 27, 2009 11:30 AM

Online video ads come in different shapes, sizes and formats; some can even be skipped. As BusinessWeek reports, the lack of uniformity is confusing enough for Web users, but it poses even bigger problems for advertisers, who need to worry about tailoring their ads to different standards as well as coming up with a way to measure effectiveness using a wide range of approaches.

"With so many different formats for video online, we incur incremental production costs every time we enter a new format," notes Nancy Ryan, media director for insurance company Allstate. As the report points out, these difficulties have resulted in many companies avoiding online video advertising altogether.

To deal with this issue, several publishers and advertisers are banding together to create a single standard format for online video ads, as reported by Joe Mandese in Online Media Daily. Called the Pool, the group aims to discover which video ads work best, and to develop a standard format. "In terms of advertising spending, television didn't take off until it got a 30-second unit," says Tracey Scheppach, senior vice-president of video innovations at Starcom MediaVest. Starcom, which is owned by ad holding giant Publicis Groupe, founded the Pool late last year when it asked Microsoft, Yahoo, Hulu, CBS Interactive, Discovery Communications, AOL, and online video ad network Broadband Enterprises to propose a total of 30 different types of ads. The group then invited large marketers to the table and took a group vote on which ads they believed would be most effective. As of Jan. 21, Starcom began testing the top five candidates, and plans to announce a winner next month.

Read the whole story at BusinessWeek/Online Media Daily »