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Asked what the optimum length of an online video is, Evil Global's Hayden Black, gave the optimum answer.

What constitutes a hit? That was the question posed by OMMA Video host Steve Smith to opening keynoter Hayden Black. Obviously, Black has never seen the hilarious film "Idiocracy," because he answered: "A lot of people go to YouTube, and think a measurement off of YouTube constitutes a hit," he said, adding,"Obviously, watching someone get kicked in the nuts, doesn't represent a hit."

The inspiration behind online video empire Evil Global Corp. was the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of â€" and then immediately crushed into dust. It all started a few years back when Evil Global founder and CEO Hayden Black was a TV promo writer pitching studios on his own pilot scripts.

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Here I am sitting on a balcony high atop the Century Plaza overlooking Hollywood and thinking it's been about 15 years since I stayed at this hotel, and then it was for a CBS network affiliates conference. The hot buttons back then were about conventional broadcast industry issues like programming, scheduling, promotion and affiliate compensation. So it seems an apt starting point for me to jump into this morning's OMMA Online conference at the very same venue where the hot buttons (and the conversation) will be very, very different, but will be affecting similar players: Video programmers, video distributors, video …

Five principles to weather the storm, per Ken Zasky, president of Sparks Communication, E*Trade's agency. 1. Speed is not negotiable: move decisively and quickly. 2. Reassure everywhere possible. Let them know you understand. 3. Be engaging. Restore the "human" element. 4. Be seen. Out of sight is out of mind. Spend money. After airing two spots on the Super Bowl (remember the baby boy doing E*Trades, dude!?), Ken says they positioned the ads online to best viral effect. 5.  Focus. Focus. Focus. Prepare. Recalibrate. E*Trade CMO Nick Utton,'s last suggestion: Put on your poker face. Don't let …

John Harrobin, SVP marketing and digital media at Verizon explained how important social research is.  Verizon does things like offering  consumers special tickets to concerts, and rewards them for freedback.  "Engagement is in our zone,"  he says. "We don't have good insights on how customers use our product that we don't measure.  We understand -- its not measurable -- how they use our product. "We have 35% market share on texting.  We thought we had great user interaface and we packaged it for free text. But we launched unlimited texting last year which made texting skyrocket.  We return a …

Steve Sullivan, SVP, Liberty Mutual says that engaging customers is critical:  "For us it's critical, because unlike many companies in this room, purchase of our product is infrequent, people see it as chore, so the wonderful thing about digital world is it offers the opportunity to create relationships with people before they become customers." Six months ago, he said, the company  launched "The Responsibility Project", an outgrowth of the ad campaign by the same name.  "It's all about notion of personal responsibility." The companyt launched Responsibilityproject.com, which has some ninety blog articles, short films.  "And we will begin  …