We just announced a major contract with Accuen, the trading desk that is centralizing media buying for all of Omnicom Media Group’s agencies. Accuen is leading the transition to electronic marketplaces and data-driven buying for Omnicom’s media budgets. Representing several of the world’s top media agencies — including OMD and PHD — Accuen selects it partners carefully to deliver on its mission: centralizing over $2 billion in global ad spend across media types.

PlayTime, TubeMogul’s video advertising platform, will be the primary tool Accuen uses to precisely buy and deliver video ads in real-time in the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia. PlayTime is available to Accuen’s planners and analysts in a custom interface designed to handle multiple campaigns and exclusive partnerships with top media companies through TubeMogul’s private exchanges. More here.

Online publishers have free tools like Quantcast available for free to measure site traffic, but no one to date has offered robust and free video analytics to sites — until now. Today, we are changing that, giving away the very same video analytics that are counted on daily by top media companies to any publisher for free.

The suite works in any Flash player, like Adobe OSMF, LongTailVideo’s JW Player or a generic Flash player (HTML 5 and Silverlight due later this summer). Real-time metrics include uniques, views, time-watched, traffic sources, city-level audience geography and more — all easily exported and shared.

This launch is a big deal for the Internet’s video publishers! Now any site that is running video can access the world’s best analytics to understand how their viewers are interacting with each and every video on their site.

* Almost all Warner Music Group videos were removed on 12/27 due to an ongoing contract dispute.

Also, it’s worth noting that a significant portion of overall music video views come from pirated versions, mashups and other unofficial clips. For instance, 60.53% of all views of Avril Lavigne videos come from unofficial versions.

Recently, GNOCDC was featured on CNN, and saw a subsequent spike in traffic. PR-wise, this seems like a dream come true, but it came with a catch: the audience dropoff for the informational video featured on their homepage was far more severe post-CNN mention, suggesting that viewers referred by CNN are less valuable as leads. Here are the numbers:

Of course, if you really are an advertiser, be sure to check out TubeMogul Marketplace, which now counts over 3500 profiles of video producers, complete with viewership statistics and contact info.

The results? The most common way viewers find a video (45.13% of all views our sample) is intuitive: going to a video site and running a search or clicking around the featured or related videos. In terms of sites referring video views, no single source dominates, with a variegated long tail of mostly blogs sourcing 80.88% of all referred traffic in our sample. Google is the top individual site referring video views at a modest 7.19% of all referred video traffic.

While unlocking a formula for making videos go viral has long been the “El Dorado” of the online marketing world, perhaps this research gives us some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.

More here.