Storybids Launches Product Placement Auction House for Brand Integrations into Online Video

Storybids Launches Product Placement Auction House for Brand Integrations into Online Video

Now Seeking Independent Filmmakers and Brand Advertisers Looking for Partnerships

IRVINE, Calif., May 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Storybids, Inc. today announced the launch of their product placement marketplace where online video content creators can get paid to feature physical products in pre-production user-generated videos, serial mini-dramas, videoblogs and webisodes. Advertisers may use Storybids' searching capabilities to seek out video creators that meet their demographic criterion such as viewership, subscriptions, and ratings or by genre or age demographic.

Video creators looking to fund their independent or professional film projects may now seek out product placement advertising opportunities by targeting specific advertisers that complement the storyline of future content. Storybids also works as a social media marketplace for filmmakers by allowing them to connect with other filmmakers for advice and collaboration on film projects.

Over two years in the making, Founders Joseph Morin and Juan Prado spent considerable time conducting research and development for the most compelling brand entertainment and online video advertising business model. The two have created a complementary means of monetizing user generated and professional video. 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 of 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.

A recent research study by Mindshare shows that viewers react negatively to interruptive TV style ads and attempt to skip them whenever possible suggesting that consumers are far more receptive to product placement in online video programming than pre and post roll advertising. PQ Media released a study in February, 2007 that showed spending on branded entertainment marketing grew 14.7% to an all time high of $22.3 billion in 2007 and is projected to increase by another 13.9% in 2008 to $25.41 billion driven by product placement, event sponsorship/marketing, and advergaming/webisodes. Benefits to the Storybids product placement marketplace include a robust transaction processing engine where video creators may upload media available for in-video advertising inventory that is completely searchable by advertisers and visa-versa where media sellers may search for specific advertisers complementary to their own video brand. 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.

Early in the company's lifecycle the Storybids team had some success in promoting a blogger's attempt to secure a commercial during Superbowl XLI and created a media frenzy with the MySuperProposal project, the end result being a wedding proposal acceptance viral video that was seen over 6 million times worldwide. CEO Joseph Morin stated "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". For more information on Storybids' unique advertising model please visit the Storybids site.

About Storybids

Storybids, Inc. is a venture capital funded start up based in Irvine, CA focusing on in-video advertisement via product placement in user generated content as well as professionally scripted webisodes. Storybids offers a new way to monetize video by inserting actual product, services or verbal mentions pre-production before a video goes viral. The videos uploaded via content creators may be uploaded to multiple video hosting sites at once and then tracked via analytics for performance via their dashboard. Advertisers may select video content creators in the marketplace via a search tool that tracks views, comments and ratings across multiple video hosting sites. Online at http://www.storybids.com/ .

Press Release Contact Information:
Joseph Morin
CEO
Storybids, Inc.
949-679-8599
joseph@storybids.com

This release was issued through WebWire(R). For more information visit http://www.webwire.com/ .

First Call Analyst:
FCMN Contact:

Source: Storybids, Inc.

CONTACT: Joseph Morin, CEO of Storybids, Inc., +1-949-679-8599,
joseph@storybids.com

Web site:

http://www.storybids.com/

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