WebProNews

Today, Verizon Superpages is announcing the rollout of a "documercials" program that allows small to midsized businesses to enhance their local listings with professionally-produced video clips.

The program will initially be limited to Seattle, LA, and the Bay Area.

How it works: a team of professional videographers visit on-site and take up to an hour of video, editing this down to a promotional clip of short duration, available when viewing a business listing at Superpages.com. At press time, I wasn't able to nail down a price list.

Is this useful to advertisers? Well, the first thing I thought of was that this professionally-produced video could be a real bargain if you could repurpose it and if Superpages' partner (the video production teams) is coming in with a cut-rate service. But there's not much talk about whether the cost here is justified in terms of user response, conversion rates on listings, etc.

The biggest limitation appears to be..., well... it's only available in the test markets.

Will Superpages' competitors (I'm thinking of Yelp and CitySearch, not the major search engines IMHO) rush to adopt this model? If advertiser demand is there and they can charge a premium for the listing (while facilitating video production at roughly break-even), then you bet they will consider it.

Superpages currently sports 18 million business listings in the United States.

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