Every March, it happens like clockwork. Business lunches go a little longer than necessary. Bandwidth usage goes up astronomically in offices across the country. Brackets are created, and wagers turn friends and co-workers to enemies. What is the cause of this drain on U.S. productivity? You guessed it: the NCAA basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. It's also one of the biggest draws in online video for both users and advertisers.

While Wall Street continues to dip, marketers have watched their share prices drop by as much as one-third to one-half their former value -- leading more and more to hold onto much of that precious cash once known as the marketing budget to bolster their balance sheets. Concurrently, the trickle down to the advertising industry looks like a standing order to deliver the same amount of TRPs or impressions we did in '08 for, let's say, 20% less spend in '09. And while you're at it, can you calculate the savings we'll realize since market pricing has dropped? Are we …

In this struggling economy, many brands are looking for new ways to build better relationships with customers and prospects while lowering their costs. Because they are measurable, engaging, and cost-effective (relative to traditional marketing), viral video campaigns provide brands with the right avenue for communicating and engaging with customers and opportunities. More often than not, a key to building better relationships with your audiences requires that you connect them to a real person who can serve as a sincere face for - a more humanized angle to -- your brand identity . Here, empowering your own employees to promote …

The month of February witnessed news, discussions, and potential relationships between cable operators, cable programmers and network broadcasters regarding online distribution of video content. First hulu.com shut down video content distribution to Boxee and TV.com. On the tails of this announcement, the Wall Street Journal reported "top cable-television providers and TV networks are exploring a sweeping solution to the threat of online video: putting large numbers of cable shows online, but accessible only to cable subscribers." A lot of rhetoric followed these newsworthy items. But there was very little discussion on whether controlling content distribution and walled gardens is good …

In an recent Video Insider, Eric Franchi wrote about the slow uptake of video as an option among DRTV advertisers. His argument, that marketers are still trying to "unlock the code" to make advertising in online video work, is spot-on, and the conclusion -- that the direct-response model we have now doesn't translate online -- resonates.