Storybids Offers Brand Integrations into Online Video

May 7, 2008 World Screen

IRVINE, May 7: Digital
start-up Storybids has launched a product placement marketplace where online
video content creators can get paid to feature physical products in
preproduction user-generated videos, serial mini-dramas, videoblogs and
webisodes.

Advertisers may use
Storybids’ search capabilities to seek out video creators that meet their demographic
criterion such as viewership, subscriptions and ratings, or by genre or age
demographic. In addition to brand advertisers, Storybids is now seeking video
creators looking to fund their independent or professional film projects. The
company aims to work as a social-media marketplace for filmmakers by allowing
them to connect with other filmmakers for advice and collaboration on film
projects.

Storybids also offers
distribution and video analytics measurement by optimizing finalized video for
search engines and submitting to several video-hosting sites such as YouTube,
MySpaceTV, Veoh, AOL Video, Metacafe, DailyMotion and others, simultaneously
allowing dashboard reporting on the video's performance via views, comments and
ratings aggregated across the various video sites.

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Storybids secured a Series
A round of venture-capital financing in August 2007 from STN Labs of Toronto,
Canada, and soft-launched a beta marketplace in February 2008. Based on a
storyboarding concept where video creators would upload storyboard samples of
potential scenes to feature product placement, the website features the
capability to accept any form of digital media such as a storyboard, images or
video as an example for advertisers to peruse for brand placement opportunities.

Storybids’ CEO, Joseph
Morin, said: "Given the Storybids team's strong background in Internet
advertising and social-media marketing, we are uniquely poised to capture
strong market share in this relatively new yet burgeoning business model. We
look forward to serving both video creators and brand advertisers with a unique
video advertising opportunity.”

—By Irene Lew