So when’s that ad money coming in? As investors clamp down, startups are looking for hipper ad formats.  Real people will smell a rat.

The ad from Dexter below tells the whole story—an embeddable video ad that friends can send to eachother.  Meebo is experimenting with a new ad strategy that eschews in-your-faceness and relies on friend referrals. Now it's up to the ad agencies to make videos that'll go viral.

From WSJ:

Web Start-Ups Seek New Ways to Click
Social, Video Sites Duck 
Some Old-Style Pitches 
And Go for Interactivity

As concerns mount that the slowing economy may hurt the online-ad market, Silicon Valley Web start-ups are developing new approaches. Companies such as online-software venture Slide and video and social-networking site Bebo are trying to run ads that appeal to a younger audience

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Elevator Pitch: Seevast operates the ad networks Pulse 360 and Kanoodle. Pulse 360 is the content-targeted sponsored links innovator that gives advertisers the control, tools, flexibility and support they need to get results with certainty, and offers publishers a partner that can help them monetize their web sites. Kanoodle is about search-targeted sponsored links. Our advertiser solutions help you reach your customers across a wide network of search sites, and our simple to use publisher solutions can help you generate revenue from your site.

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Elevator Pitch: We're providing a new way for women young and old to reach out, find out, express themselves, connect, share their experiences and ultimately give and get something of value. Real Girls Media sites combine real voices with guided editorial and the dynamism of an online community. Through our proprietary technology, we enable users to easily submit – and automatically publish their thoughts and stories.

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Elevator Pitch: ShopText is a mobile commerce and promotions company. Our software platform transforms any advertisement into a point of sale opportunity. ShopText technology creates a secure, direct-to-consumer marketplace where consumers can shop, sample and save.

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Elevator Pitch: Spiceworks produces technology to connect IT pros with the information they're looking for, with each other and with technology vendors. Spiceworks IT Desktop, a business application for IT professionals, is free and ad supported.

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Elevator Pitch: ProsperoTechnologies is the leading provider of community content management solutions for the online publishing industry. We enable organizations to easily, quickly, and cost-effectively develop branded, integrated communities and social networks comprised of message boards, blogs, ratings, and chats and to manage them using a single, intuitive platform.

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Elevator Pitch: SpiralFrog is a web-based, ad-supported music experience, combining music discovery with the free acquisition of audio and music video files, licensed from major and independent record labels. SpiralFrog is the market-driven solution to illicit pirate file-sharing sites, with an easy to use Web interface that allows music lovers to discover artists, songs, music videos and artist information.

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Elevator Pitch:  It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the growing number of web sites and social web communities. ShareThis lets you instantly access all of your profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing and updating. We think users should be in control of their online world.

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Elevator Pitch: Stardoll is a virtual paperdoll community site for everyone who enjoys fashion, design and making friends. At Stardoll you can create your own MeDoll or choose from our ever growing collection of celebrity dolls and dress them up in our wide selection of fashions. Every celebrity doll has a wardrobe full of unique clothes and there are new dolls released every week. The membership is completely FREE and most of our members are girls between the ages of 7 and 17. Stardoll is one of few places on the Internet developed with an emphasis on girls' self-expression through fantasy and fashion play.

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Elevator Pitch: Placecast puts geographic information to work for the advertising industry. Our revolutionary online ad network combines positioning data - where someone is - with what we call "place" data, which is other information about where people are that helps us further qualify them. We use what we know about where people are connecting to define who they are and what they are doing at the time.

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