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.

We’re getting our ping-pong paddles dusted off over at Blogads HQ and gearing up for pADdle Battle 2011. Triangle-area advertising and new media folks are invited to join us on June 23 at Fullsteam Brewery in Durham’s “D.I.Y. District.” Make some new friends in the industry over local craft beer and friendly table-top competition. The party gets started at 6pm, and the tournament kicks off soon after.

It costs $5 to play, and all proceeds go to the Durham branch of the The Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina. It’s free to come and hang out. We’ll also be accepting canned goods for the food bank. The tastier, the better.

Think you’ve got game? Sign up now.

This year’s Carnival has come and gone, but according to these clever branding initiatives, there is always something fun going on in the streets of Brazil.

In February, Coca-Cola and Definition6 converted this delivery truck into a mobile Happiness Machine. They hit the streets of Rio, and delivered Coke — I mean, Happiness — to people in the streets of South America’s second-largest city.

When Mu-Mu Milk launched in South Brazil last year, it faced a saturated market that wasn’t exactly clamoring for another “boring and white” beverage. How did they quadruple their market share in four months? They bought the exclusive sponsorship to the CowParade, the world’s largest urban art event.

How do you win friends at the biggest party in South America? You lead them to the beer. In a fun mix of old technology and new, Antartica Beer and AlmapBBDO invented the BEER GPS, so revelers in need could easily find the “BOA.”

So why Brazil? Is it because they’re hosting a future World Cup and Olympics? Or are Brazillians just really into staging big outdoor events? Marketplace’s Steve Chiotakis asked Weiden + Kennedy’s Andre Gustavo why agencies have their sites set on Brazil. Gustavo’s answer?

The obvious answer is because of the size of the market. Brazil’s got 190 million people living there, so it’s a huge market. Economy is stable, economy is growing, the country’s gaining importance in the world scenario.

If you zoom out of Brazil, and out of the ad industry, you’ll see that the entire continent is teeming with tech. Here’s TNW’s list of 10 South American startups to look out for.

Damn You AutoCorrect’s Jillian Madison has positioned herself as a major player in the world of hilarious blogs. In addition to Damn You AutoCorrect, her hysterical sites include Parent Fails, Food Network Humor, Awkward Names, Parents Shouldn’t Text, My Rough Life, Wrong Number Texts and PopHangover, just to name a few.  Each site highlights one distinctive funny theme, and Damn You AutoCorrect focuses on the weird and amusing miscommunication that occurs when someone’s cell phone accidentally auto corrects the spelling of their text messages.

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

A: I started Pophangover, my flagship pop culture humor website, back in 1999 – and that’s before blogging even existed! Blogging’s come a long way! I had to use static HTML pages and update them constantly, and it was such a time consuming process. I actually started the site as a place to make fun of all the ridiculous things I was observing on TV and in pop culture on a daily basis. Over the past 12 years, the network has expanded to over 12 sites like AwkwardNames.com and WhyDidYouBuyMeThat.com, and I’m adding more every year.

Q: How do you think Damn You AutoCorrect stands out amongst blogs of the same genre?

A: Everyone can relate to it! We all carry cell phones around in our pockets these days. Everyone has either been autocorrected, or knows someone who has. That, and I think the content, is universally funny and relatable by people of all ages. (more…)

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.

Need a pick-me-up? In a first-of-its-kind homepage takeover, Ritz Crackerfuls have “Cheesed Up”  PerezHilton.com, allowing readers to interact with Perez’s posts in new, odd, cheesy ways.

Think Whitney would look more dignified in glasses? Maybe Lady Gaga should be a Viking? Using the palette beside the posts, readers can drag resizable stickers onto any photo. Like PerezHilton.com, Ritz Crackerfuls is a perfect quick, reenergizing, “cheesy” mid-day pick-me-up.

Even Perez himself, notoriously persnickety, is loving it:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/PerezHilton/status/67963695984160768″]

Have you ever been cruising through your Facebook News Feed and wondered to yourself, “Is it just me, or is this post completely ridiculous?”  It’s not just you. The founders of Lamebook, Matthew Genitempo and Jonathan Standefer, and their strong following are definitely with you. Matthew and Jonathan appreciate the hilarious photos, status updates and conversations that take place on Facebook so much, they decided to document them on Lamebook starting in April 2009.  Since then, these two Texan graphic designers have updated fans with daily posts of the funny–often unintentional– posts that make it onto Facebook. In addition to checking out Lamebook, fans can enjoy join over 19,000 others by “liking” their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter, where they have more than 21,000 current followers.

Q:  When and why did you start blogging?

A: The idea for Lamebook was born from a few beers and a little bit of
frustration in October of 2008. Matthew and I were just hanging out one
night, talking and joking about all of the dumb content we would see on
our Facebook feeds and decided to start cataloging them just for fun. So
we finally launched the site in April of 2009 and were really happy with
the response.

Q: How do you think your blog stands out amongst blogs of the same genre?

A: We are the original blog to feature all of the funny and bizarre posts
from Facebook and we think the quality of our content and the design of
the website is much better than other copycat sites. (more…)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow quoted LBAN blogger, Steve Benen of Washington Monthly’s Political Animal in last night’s episode. In addition to the quote, she called Benen “The Smartest Politics Blogger in the Country.”

Here’s the quote:

And while that’s certainly good news, it probably won’t come as a relief to vulnerable House Republicans. Remember, they knew ending Medicare would be unpopular, they knew Democrats would never go for it, but they voted for a budget plan that scrapped Medicare anyway. Some of those GOP lawmakers almost certainly didn’t want to go along, but they stuck their necks out and voted for this ridiculous agenda because their leaders asked them to.

A month later, those same leaders are moving away from their own idea, leaving their most vulnerable members with nothing more than attacks ads to look forward to.

Congrats, Steve!

Have you met baby Sophie Lee yet? She’s been making the rounds this week, starring in a heart-warming new spot for Google Chrome that is pulling the heartstrings of the technorati:

Tim Nudd, AdWeek (AdFreak):

…it shows a father using Google products (all accessed through Chrome) to create a scrapbook of his daughter’s early years. Google says it’s based on a true story, although it used actors for the spot. Still, nicely done by Google Creative Lab and Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Shawn Hartley, AdPulp:

How many parents of little ones watch this and think they might start writing to their kid(s) via a destination email account?

Matt Brian, The Next Web:

With many computer owners not knowing they are even able to download a new browser for their machines, Google is hoping that the sentimental value of its campaign can increase visibility and ultimately downloads.

Jeff Sass, Dad-O-Matic:

Google has a winner with it’s current ad for Chrome, as a Dad’s love and pride for his daughter is brilliantly expressed through the thoughtful and personal digital history he creates for her, leveraging Gmail and other Google products from within his Chrome browser.

Tug McTigh, American Copywriter:

Holy schnikes is this awesome. If you’re a parent, you will not be able to hold it together. Fine, fine stuff from Google. And that closing line, “the web is what you make of it” is terrific.

But little is being said about all the layers of technology between us and Baby Sophie. Clair Caine Miller of the New York Times reports that this is part of Google’s “the Web is what you make of it” campaign. But in this day of techno-ubiquity, doesn’t this prove that we are what the Web makes of us?

In his essay, “It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened,” Chuck Klosterman says this about our relationship with TV advertising:

We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them.

Somehow this relationship has not been as amicable when it comes to online ads. We block banners with browser plugins, get annoyed by half-page auto-expanders, and poke fun at contextual ads. Commercials get extra life on YouTube, TV specials and dedicated praise sites, while online ads appear today, and drift off into pixelated oblivion tomorrow. Until now.

We couldn’t help but notice a new trend of online ad warehouses. From Facebook’s ad testing ground, to what is essentially a rest home for banners that treat online executions with the same sort of dignity as their television counterparts, here’s our roundup:

Facebook Studio

In a move that garnered mixed reviews from the ad world, Facebook stepped into the online advertising arena last month, with a site that houses ad creative, case studies and awards. It’s integrated with Facebook Connect, allowing users to “vote” on their favorite creative by “liking” it. It seems like a site that would only be popular with industry types but with 31k “likes” for the site itself, you’ve gotta think it’s being used by non-ad people, too. (more…)