SMB Video: Thoughts on Yelp's Deal With TurnHere

Catching up on notable items in the local space over the past week, you may have heard that Yelp has partnered with TurnHere to exclusively offer video to its SMB advertisers.

This will include a few different tiers of service that should appeal to the wide range of businesses Yelp works with. These include:

Standard Video: Advertisers receive a 30-second video slide show made from a series of photos provided by the business with music and custom voice-over narration.

Premium Video: Advertisers receive a 30- to 60-second custom video shot at their place of business by a professional filmmaker from the TurnHere network.

Yelp advertisers can also opt into TurnHere’s additional promotion packages that include SEO work and distribution to YouTube, Google Places, Facebook and Yahoo Video.

Yelp is on a roll lately. Like the OpenTable partnership last week, this falls into the category of “why didn’t this happen a long time ago?” Video capability makes a lot of sense for Yelp as local competition heats up. This comes not only from the Citysearchs of the world but also the mobile/local/social upstarts taking mindshare like Foursquare.

This should meanwhile fulfill evolving advertiser demand for more multimedia rich online advertising. This is especially true in Yelp’s sweet spot of bars & restaurants where visual aids are additive. And Yelp is meanwhile picking up activity with professional services like doctors and lawyers, where video has likewise resonated.

All of this is meanwhile supported by our Local Commerce Monitor survey data. Our latest wave of research (Wave 13), showed that 60 percent of SMB advertisers that used video advertising were either extremely or somewhat satisfied, while just 5 percent were somewhat dissatisfied.

This speaks to growing demand or video as well as satisfaction levels for the early adopters. In other words, it’s supportive of video’s continued growth and of Yelp’s timing to get into the game. TurnHere has meanwhile proved over the past few years to be the gold standard in scalable SMB video production.

Heck, we even have TurnHere come to our conferences to shoot video for us. The Emeryville, California-based video production house has been around since 2005 and has raised 8.6 million in venture funding.