Film is an immensely powerful medium. At its most intimate, home movies are capable of capturing intensely personal moments. At its most grand, multi-million dollar feature films can ignite the imagination of a global audience and rack up billions in profit. After only a few short years in existence, online video is quickly catching up to its more established media siblings. Part of video's acquisition of greater cultural currency is that the medium is a more potent vehicle for interactive marketers than ever before.

Despite its garnering a place among traditional film formats, online video has a lot of growing up left to do. It's young. It's inexperienced. It's still going through a tremendous number of changes, and even though it acts mature, online media is still working through the growing pains of improving technology and broadband penetration.

For marketers, online video offers some very compelling features; chief among them is heightened engagement. But before jumping into the online video fray, marketers should look back at several years of online video successes and failures. Lessons learned from past efforts will help to develop a solid online video game plan today.

Author notes: Nanette Marcus is an editor at iMedia Connection. Read full bio.