Most media can now be consumed online, from TV shows, to radio, to the news. In order to stay in front of their target audience, advertisers should be placing themselves where their audience is located, especially when it comes to video.

Google offers in-stream video ads so that advertisers can get their message to their target audience. In- stream video ads are 15 and 30 second video commercials that play before, during or after an online video. 15 second spots are recommended for in-stream video ads because that it is one of the most widely accepted time formats. In short, an in-stream video ad is a TV ad that plays on the internet. In-stream video ads are economical and cost less than a traditional TV buy.

In-stream video ads can be set up in Google AdWords. Google allows advertisers to choose between a cost per click or a cost per impression payment model. Google recommends starting with a cost per impression payment and then switching over to a cost per click after viewing results. Once a payment method is selected, advertisers can choose if they want to run their ads on YouTube only or expand their reach to other websites that accept video ads. In order to help advertiser’s ads play in front of the right audience, Google permits advertisers to select which category they want their video ads to be viewed on.  For example, if your company sells auto insurance, then the auto category would be good for your video ads. It would make no sense to select the medical category.

Once an advertiser has chosen the categories on which to run and uploaded their video ads, Google determines when these ads will run. Video ads can be paused and new ads can be uploaded at any time.  Just like paid placement campaigns, stats are provided on impressions, clicks, view through conversions and more.

In-stream video ads are a great way to get a message to the right target audience at a very low cost. Some advertisers have been slow to run in-stream video ads, but those who are running them are ahead of the curve.

Image search relevance is not something that we think about very often, but as Karen Umpierre noted recently, image search is getting smarter. Google can look inside images and tell the difference between faces and non-faces … well, usually. Occasionally a non-face slips in but it’s pretty impressive. This brings up the question of the future of search. Will there come a day when we won’t have to put 200 words of text on a page for it to rank well for relevance in a search query? The answer may be yes because new search engine technologies are emerging that take search into the images themselves. Instead of image search using text, we have visual search using images.

Maybe the most exciting new visual search idea is Nokia’s wireless Point & Find where a user just takes a picture and gets relevant information about the image based on information on the internet – including location, price, etc. While this is very much an emerging technology, it could very well change the way people shop. Imagine seeing some shoes you like at a party and being able to find them using your wireless device’s built-in search. Nokia claims this technology is at least three years away, but in the meantime, there are some visual search engines available now.

One that deserves special mention is Like.com because it is the first engine that is actually using visual search to help shoppers find what they want. For example, let’s say I want to buy some shoes. I go to the shoes section of Like.com and find a style that I like. Then I just click on the button marked Visual Search. This gives me a display of shoes that all resemble the shoes that I chose grouped by “overall matches”, “style matches”, “brand matches” and “color matches”. The most interesting aspect is the opportunity to refine my search by selecting a portion of the original image.

I just draw a box around the part of the image that I most want to match and Like.com gives me a new result. Like.com has just recently launched a new site after a lengthy beta period so we’re interested in seeing how well the new site is received. Will shoppers take to it? One problem may be that, as we noted with Google’s face search, the results aren’t perfect. For example, one of the top ten results for my search for matches to that spiky heel was this wedge heeled number. Of course, it is a high wedge – sort of spiky as wedges go and roughly the same shape as the heel of the shoe I selected so maybe this is just the visual search algorithm’s interpretation of my query. This brings me to the point of my post today – image relevance.

Just because a search engine uses a different point of reference (shape, color, style as opposed to words) doesn’t mean that we can stop worrying about relevance. If visual search becomes more prevalent, search engine optimization may actually become even more complicated with considerations of image quality, angle and other visually based factors coming to the fore. Furthermore, even Like.com relies on linguistic navigation to subsidize their product search and this is unlikely to change. So, if you were waiting around for the image search technology to get better before you optimized your site for keyword relevance, we would recommend that you not wait because whether it’s images or text, making your pages relevant to search queries will always matter.