It’s no secret. As Digiday’s Mike Shields points out, this is a boomtime for video ads:

Here’s another indicator that the online video ad market is surging: twice as many video ads were served in the first quarter compared to the same period in 2010.

With our DIY system, you can add video to any Blogad unit by dropping a YouTube or Vimeo URL into our form.

That’s it.

You don’t have to deal with rich media costs, and there isn’t any more production work to do. And unlike other video ads, Blogads can boost your video count.

ClickZ calls the 2012 presidential race the “Video Election,” saying video “is poised to have a greater impact on the 2012 Presidential race than any election before it.”

One political advocacy group bought Blogads on 50 LBAN blogs and received over 3200 new views for their YouTube video.

Video advertising is red hot, so strike now and put your video in front of the influential blog readers of over 3500 blogs.

Advertisers hunting for good social media partners should focus on women.

In a recent survey of 2,480 female bloggers, 90% of the respondents like partnering with brands, as long as they are compensated. Of the 42% of bloggers approached by brands, the most commonly accepted sponsorship types are online reviews, (26%), affiliate program promotions (15%), and direct advertising (13%).

As MarketingProfs.com points out, bloggers value relationships with brands:

Female bloggers have positive opinions about brand-sponsored social media and blog campaigns: 60% say they respect brands that want to interact with bloggers, remarking “campaigns are fun,” often “validate their blogs,” and present “great opportunities to earn revenue.”

A separarte study by Marina Maher reveals that this relationship is mutually beneficial, as Jack Neff of AdvertisingAge writes:

These “Influence-Hers” have considerably larger social networks — both online and offline — totaling on average about 170 people they interact with regularly, compared with 75 for a typical woman, said Marina Maher Managing Director Keith Hughes.

Besides having a larger social circle, they also tend to be more actively engaged with brands. The Influence-Hers are 38% more likely than typical women to “like” brands on Facebook or to provide personal information to brands they like on Facebook. They’re also 105% more likely to post positive experiences and 125% more likely to post negative experiences about brands online.

We’ve had similar findings in our own network, with a strong majority female bloggers eager to team up with brands for fun campaigns. If you’re looking to partner with “Influence-Hers,” check out our Women’s Hive, featuring over 350 of the most influential women on the web.

Move-on’s Eli Pariser had an awesome article in May’s Wired magazine about modes of persuasion.

Today, most recommendation and targeting systems focus on the products: Commerce sites analyze our consumption patterns and use that info to figure out that, say, viewers of Iron Man also watch The Dark Knight. But new work by Dean Eckles, a doctoral student in communications at Stanford University, suggests there’s another factor that can be brought into play. Retailers could not only personalize which products are shown, they could personalize the way they’re pitched, too.

Eckles set up an experimental online bookstore and encouraged customers to browse the titles and mark a few for purchase. By alternating the types of pitches—Appeal to Authority (“Malcolm Gladwell says you’ll like this”), Social Proof (“All your friends on Facebook are buying this book”), and the like—Eckles could track which mode of argument was most persuasive for each person.

Some book buyers felt comforted by the fact that an expert reviewer vouched for their intended product. Others preferred to go with the most popular title or a money-saving deal. Some people succumbed to what Eckles calls “high need for cognition” arguments—smart, subtle points that require some thinking to get (“The Hunger Games is the Inferno of children’s literature”). Still others responded best to being hit over the head with a simple message (“The Hunger Games is a fun, fast read!”). And certain pitches backfire: While some people rush for a deal, others think discounts mean the merchandise is subpar. By eliminating persuasion styles that didn’t work on a particular individual, Eckles was able to increase the effectiveness of a recommendation by 30 to 40 percent.

And here’s a simple 2006 video that sums up the strategy.

Advertisers continue to start their own Twitter trends with Blogads new “Tweet This” feature, which allows readers to update their Twitter status directly from the ad.

One of the earliest adopters of this new feature is publisher Simon & Schuster, who used tweetable Blogads to promote Bethenny Frankel’s new book, A Place of Yes. When blog readers clicked the “Tweet this” button at the bottom of the ads, they were given this recommended tweet:

The ad generated 292 tweets on top of 6700 clicks. Its success is due to a smart tweet that included a link to the book, the author’s Twitter handle, and the hook, “Get Your Happy On.”

Ready to get your ad’s tweet on? Build your own tweetable ad with our DIY system now!

By disaggregating individual readers into their interests/behaviors, does dynamic ad serving ignore something powerful?  Randall Rothenberg, past and future president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, gets into the topic in his Q&A with Adweek:

AW: If you can go back in the 15-16-year history of digital media and make a business adjustment, what would it be?

RR: I’d get rid of the dynamic serving of advertising. You want me to explain?

AW: Indeed.

RR: Direct response used to be expensive—you had to pay postage—but suddenly, if you could serve five ads on a page, in a medium where your incremental cost of content and distribution is practically zero, direct response becomes incredibly cheap. There’s nothing at all wrong with direct response advertising. But it’s a business that doesn’t care about content or context—it just cares about the yield curve.

AW: This idea of the free-floating audience—a demographically defined audience ofNew York Times readers, for instance, made up of people who have effectively never read the Times. Who’s that good for?

RR: The real question is, “Is man a modernist construct or a post-modernist construct?” Man in the modernist construct is a single, unitary, consistent being. Post-modern man consists of multiple cells. Reading the Times I’m a different person than when I’m watching what not to wear on Bravo.

We’ve always believed that one of the huge advantages of advertising on blogs is the knowledge that, beyond reaching an interested individual, your brand or message are tapping into passionate community. Most important decisions are based on social judgments — who else is buying or listening or laughing — and the smartest advertising leverages a communal consciousness.

We recently rolled out a “Tweet this” button for ads, allowing advertisers to recommend a Twitter update directly from an ad.

Animal rights group PETA was one of the first advertisers to use the tweetable Blogads, and the results have been phenomenal.

Multiple iterations of their ad ran across 59 blogs. In all, the ads generated 4,636 tweets and 10s of thousands of clicks.

This is just the latest innovation to our custom units, and it’s proving to be a big win for advertisers who are looking to spark their own Twitter trend.

Ready to initiate your trend now? Visit our Buy Ads page to get started.

Have you checked out our new page summing up how to promote your book online with ads on blogs?

Now advertisers and fans of a particular blog can give a Facebook “like” to the ad order page for individual blogs. For example, here’s the order page for GalaDarling.

Want to do some chumming to get advertisers excited? Try our new one-time-only, first-come-first-serve discount for advertising on your blog.

We’ve just added a new twist to our discount code functionality that allows a blogger to create a discount coupon that can only be used by one buyer. Log in to your account, click “adstrips” then click “customize adstrip.” Create a code, set the validity to “one-time use,” then click “proceed” at the bottom of the page. You’re ready for a flash sale!

Next, just tweet or blog about the discount. As the folks over at Woot have proven, buyers LOVE a flash sale, particularly if the quantities on offer are limited.

Here’s a post about discount code functionality.

Finally, don’t forget to tell your advertisers to “like” your advertising order page while they’re there.

(Sale photo credit: timparkinson.)

We’ve done a nifty redesign of the advertising order page for individual blogs. If you’re a blogger, you’ll want to log in and upload a bigger masthead and customize the margin colors and, if you haven’t done so before, load in advertiser testimonials.

And here’s the new version of the page for DailyKos:

And, for reference, the next image shows what the old version of the same page looked like. Whew.