Perhaps you’d heard of Spotify before references to it started showing up in your Facebook feed. That would likely put you in the minority. However, there’s a good possibility that you’ve seen what your friends are listening to via notifications from the online music service appearing in your Facebook feed. Welcome to the power of Facebook’s Open Graph.

While we have integrated our own Spotify-like Open Graph capability, our technical team has gone to great lengths to ensure that we’re done so in a user-friendly manner. In short, we’re not looking to take over users’ feeds and turn them into our own private distribution channel on Facebook. Rather, we started by considering what users want and working from there—even when it resulted in us nixing our first iteration of Open Graph.

We want to provide videos that our fans want to watch, and we want to enable them to be ahead of the curve on discovering content and sharing it with their friends however and whenever they want. Should they choose to share on Facebook, we have made it incredibly easy for them to do so, but we’ve made it equivalently easy for them to opt out. Furthermore, should they rethink sharing a certain video, they can unshare it after the fact.

In total, we put our entire Open Graph integration together with our users squarely in mind. We wanted to give them the ability to control what they share and who they share with as well as give them the ability to unshared at their discretion. We want to make the seamlessly integrate content discovery and sharing, and Facebook is a natural place to start.

This new video ad technology guarantees quality page, incorporates social sharing functionality to maximize viral pass-along and includes a suite of analytics for tracking. The Social Video Accelerator will debut across our entire family of sites and our network, which now reaches more than 120 million unique viewers each month. Additionally, this technology is designed to distribute both advertiser assets such as trailers and videos as well as branded entertainment created in partnership with our award winning in-house Creative Lab.

Among the first customers using the new technology is Rockstar games parent Take-Two Interactive, which runs multiple trailer release campaigns a year.  For more information on the social Video Accelerator, click here.

For more on the Best-Rated Apps of 2011, see our coverage in the Huffington Post and TechCrunch and download the Break.com App, available on iOS, Android, and tablet devices including iPad, Nook and Kindle.

While increased spending in digital video is something the majority of advertisers can agree on, how they buy video inventory, what format they purchase to showcase video assets, in which pricing model and on what device all provide considerable differences of opinion in the marketing community.  This year, we saw a sharp increase in the use of Video Ad Networks.  We also noted an increase in the use of Cost Per View as a model for purchasing video inventory.  While pre-roll is still favored 3:1 by advertisers over the next video format, they expect large gains in placing dollars within mobile video and connected devices.

We hope you find the study useful, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.  Congratulations to the team for putting together this years’ report.

Please find the full study at:
Digital Video Advertising Trends

The purpose of Movember is simple: fight men’s health afflictions through awareness and fundraising.  While the moustache thing is a fun gimmick, it’s also an avenue to discussing some of the very real health problems men face.

The statistics are staggering:

• In 2011, more than 240,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer; more than 33,000 will die from it
• One new prostate cancer case occurs every 2.2 minutes
• A man dies from prostate cancer every 15.6 minutes
• 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime.
• 48% of testicular cancer cases occur in men between the ages of 20 and 34.
• 1 in 271 men will be diagnosed with testicular cancer during their lifetime.
• Men commit suicide four times as often as women.
• An estimated 8.7 million adult men over the age of 20 in the US have diabetes- and a third do not know it.
• Approximately 50 million men and women in the US have high blood pressure- almost 30 percent of them do not know it.

With a network and a fan base made up primarily of men, it made perfect sense for Break to get involved.  In addition to our internal participation, which assembled a network that has raised more than $40 thousand, we produced a number of original videos to support the cause and rally our fans to do the same.  Take a look:

Original Rap Celebrating the Greatest Mo’s in History

PSA for the Movember Foundation

Original Animation: 40 Staches in 100 Seconds

Infographic Discussing Men’s Health Issues

Thanks to all Breakers and fans for supporting such a worthy cause, and we look forward to continuing the effort next year!

Inc.com, the in-the-know site for growing businesses, recently covered our Hispanic destination Tu Vez in their article Breaking Into the New Hispanic Marketplace. As the fastest growing demographic, Tu Vez was created to fill a void for Latino men looking for online humor and video content that speaks to them. Simultaneously, Tu Vez offers advertisers access to an underserved market. Inc.com outlines how Tu Vez was conceived, focus-group tested, and now delivering the right content to Hispanic guys.  Check out the full article here.

Drop your razor and channel your inner Burt Reynolds, it’s time for Movember!  Each year the Movember Foundation runs a moustache-growing campaign for men’s health charities throughout the month of November.  We are proud official partners in their cause and know this movement will resonate with our audience. We are helping them tell the story of Movember through original videos and create an on-air PSA, which is currently running on CBS.

Here in the Break Media office, our teams are forming with dedicated dudes ready to sport a mo starting November 1^st. We’re looking for a few good men- ok a LOT of men – to join our Break and MadeMan teams. Not only will you help raise awareness for a great cause, but we have awesome prizes for our fellow mo bros. Join our team, shave November 1^st and Break will contribute on behalf every team member

We also will be featuring a moustaches photo contest on Facebook and will be posting more videos in the upcoming weeks. So don’t miss out – sign up to be a Mo Bro today!

To hype up the re-release of popular Fox Home Entertainment DVD titles, Break Media created a video series spoofing six iconic moments from their flicks. A pivotal scene from Fight Club played out comically when senior citizens re-enacted Brad Pitt asking Edward Norton to hit him in the face. These videos lent themselves to the tagline “Don’t Mess With An Original” with a promotion to buy the Blu-Ray on DVD. The success of this campaign lead Fox Home Entertainment to come back to us again for another round of spoofs for Father’s Day, featuring Taken and Rocky.

We were thrilled when the campaign won the Silver ADDY for Best Internet Commercial and ecstatic with our recent OMMA win for Online Advertising Creativity: Video Campaign. Our Creative Lab continues to deliver knock-out original content for our partners. Check out the award-winning video.

Check out what some notable publications have said about our mobile reach:

• socalTech.com, 8/17/11: Break Media Sees Move Towards Mobile
• All Things D, 8/17/11: Mobile Media Mavens Like Funny Videos, Baseball
• MediaPost, 8/17/11: Break Media’s Video App Cracks 1.5 Million Downloads, Serves a Tough Crowd
• ReelSEO.com, 8/17/11: 12% Of Online Video Views Come From Mobile – Break Media