Mad Men is back and better than ever, according to its latest ratings. But is the ad business still like that? It can't be, right? Or maybe it can. Maybe the ad business, like any business, has its share of crazy stories, wild sex, and bizarre pitch meetings. After all, sometimes we just have to do a little dirty work to land clients.

Click-through rate is a dirty phrase. But yet, it is a metric still used widely in digital media and also in online video. Online video ad firm Videology studied the clicking behavior in online video ads in February and found that viewers are almost three times more likely to click on a video ad at the 25% to 50% viewing mark in the video. If a viewer hasn't clicked by the three-quarter mark, there's a good chance they'll finish watching the entire spot.

Personalization works. At least, that's what cable network CMT learned during the January online tune-in campaign for its recently launched series "Bayou Billionaires" and "My Big Redneck Vacation." The network paired up with online video ad technology firm Eyeview to use its personalization tools for online video spots. The video ads contained local tune-in information for the two shows, tailored to the user's geographic area.

It seems everywhere we turn we hear more about social video. Not just branded video that marketers release on YouTube and promote the heck out of. But social video powered by social games - you know, those things we're all really doing when we're on social networks - Car Town, Deal or No Deal, Happy Pets and the like. Online video platform TubeMogul is eager for a bit of the social video action. The company has introduced a real-time buying system for social video that lets marketers serve up ads in games being played on Facebook.

Several leading online video technology vendors have inked fresh partner deals and rolled out new features in the last week, including Taboola, Digitalsmiths and Kaltura. Tracking particular deals, such as these, can offer insight into emerging trends in Web video. For starters, apparel and footwear retailer Zappos paired up with Kaltura to use its enterprise video tools to power online video on the Zappos site. Zappos is a big win for Kaltura given the prominence of the brand. But the deal also underscores the importance of online video as a marketing tool for e-commerce. The retailer will use the video …

If you were given the choice to skip an ad, you'd skip it, right? Most of us would. Even those of us in the ad business. That was the admission of many speakers on the panel I moderated at OMMA Global earlier this week on elective video ad formats.

Cord-cutting? What's that? The biggest multichannel video providers in the United States added subscribers last year, rather than lost them. A just-released study from Leichtman Research Group found that the 14 biggest service providers representing about 94% of the market added more than 380,000 new video customers in 2011.

Brands should draw from various sources to feed their YouTube channels. That was the insight from brand, agency and YouTube executives at the OMMA Global conference held this week in San Francisco. "You don't have to create something every day or every week, but create something that brings value so people will come back and hit subscribe so the next time they are on YouTube they will come looking for you," said Eric Meyerson, Head of Video Advertiser Marketing at Google. He explained that some of the most successful brands have built audiences by drawing from content they produce on …

The number of online video ads viewed by Web consumers doubled year over year. In February, Americans saw 7.5 billion video ads, according to comScore's just-released February online video figures. That's up from 3.8 billion total video ads a year ago. And while there are variations in the number of ads delivered month by month - 5.6 billion ads delivered in January; 7.1 billion served in December, for instance - the overall trend is positive.

February was a big month for social TV chatter, driven by events like the Oscars, the Super Bowl and the Grammys. In addition, the amount of conversations and check-ins around TV shows has grown 91% year over year, said social TV tracking service Trendrr.tv in a recently released white paper. The last year has seen a slew of programmers from Discovery to Showtime release new and additional social TV apps to promote synchronous viewing, some of which include online video. Plus, there's been ample attention by media agencies to startups that can track and quantify social buzz around shows and …