Digital advertising venues offer a plethora of data for marketers to mine, but there's still not enough to prove ROI, including for online video. That's the finding of a survey of more than 200 marketers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers this spring. The study released Monday and revealed that even as new media advertising on mobile phones, social media and online video grows, marketers still aren't terribly confident in these platforms.

Pre-rolls are the dominant form of online video advertising, but display ads still rule the Web in general. So it's natural for technologists to look for ways to build video into all those omnipresent banner ads. One of the latest efforts comes from social video platform VideoGenie, which has rolled out a new ad unit that marries user-generated video and display ads.

Internet video has a secret weapon to drive video views, and it's a tool that nearly anyone can take advantage of. Metadata. Sure, the word sounds unsexy, but just add some text to a video and voila! It returns higher in search, it's found more easily -- and oh, yeah, advertisers can better target video ads to content.

I love numbers. I love statistics. I love any and all benchmarks for online video. Digital advertising is a business that's differentiated by its ability to adroitly measure virtually any aspect of a campaign, a brand, a trend. So if you dig charts too, then bookmark SocialBakers.com, a social monitoring service that measures which brands are ticking up on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google + and other social sharing venues on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

TV advertising may still command billions of dollars each year, but its growth will be largely flat over the next few years. So marketers should seek out connected TV opportunities to keep growing the video ad market, according to an IHS Screen Digest report commissioned by ad management platform VideoPlaza that's slated to release today. The report focuses on the United States and on Western Europe including France, UK, Spain, Italy and Germany.

American video consumers are able to shoehorn a lot of traditional TV viewing, mobile phone watching, and online video-ing into their waking hours, as evidenced by Netflix's newest viewing stat, coupled with fresh research on multichannel services.

Interactive overlays can often significantly increase the amount of time viewers spend with an ad and with the brand. That helps in particular when raising awareness for a cause, as Tremor Video learned in a recent campaign for hunger-relief organization Feeding America in which engagement with interactive pre-rolls far exceeded the average.

Ah, can you smell it in the air? It's summer partnerships, which can lead to fall mergers! The online video industry has been all cozy with each other lately (dare I say, there's some serious dating going on!), and the newest set of partners to cuddle up are real-time ad buying platform TubeMogul and interactive video technology firm Innovid.

Online video ad network AdExcite is betting interstitial video ads are more appealing to consumers than pre-roll ads and it's got some recent campaign data to back up that claim. AdExcite is hanging its hat on its "slider" type of video ad format that delivers short video ads next to text or other content on more than 1,000 websites, such as GotchaMovies.com, Examiner.com and others, collectively reaching more than 75 million uniques a month.

Google knows just a wee bit about display ads and a wee bit about video ads. But how do the two mediums play together?