Video Marketing

A view of video marketing:

The most watched video on YouTube has more than 100 million views; the most commented has over 400,000 coments. There's something to this.
Videos as both advertising and content continue to pull their own weight in generating interest. With companies like Visible Measures focusing measuring engagement and others focusing on interaction; that section of screen real estate may become the fourth screen.
eMarketer predicts that video, including rich media, will account for 20% of online advertising by 2012. That's ~$10 billion. Things to overcome include both technical standards regarding format and pricing/measurement questions. Dedicated video networks are emerging to focus on this space.
The distinction between consumer generated and professional video remains blurred. The bigger bane of every brand marketer is guilt by association or sponsoring objectionable content. The need for brand-safe content and appropriate audiences remains the challenge.
Videos have a different property than either text or banner ads - they have duration. This will raise questions about what the mechanism for payment is: launch, first 10 seconds, completion. The value proposition likely changes through out the stream.
Introducing iGRP - the Internet Gross Rating Point. If you want a share of the bulk of advertising spend (TV) then speak in terms they understand. The benefit of this approach is that it relates size of campaign to size of audience; something impressions doesn't do at all. An example is here.
A fair number of constraints to using video come from the publisher/network side of the equation - footprint, file size, etc. At some point the definition of the boundaries of a video will be relaxed, either physically or temporally.
The IAB's standards doc is here.