What is an online video ad? Is it preroll video in front of the featured presentation? Postroll? Right in the middle of the segment? Is it 15 seconds? 10 seconds? 30 seconds? Is it a clickable overlay message on top of the featured video? Is it a simple banner ad placed adjacent to the video offering? Or some combination of the above? The Pool, a consortium of publishers that includes Publicis Groupe, Microsoft, Yahoo, Hulu, CBS, AOL and more, as well advertisers including Applebee’s and Capital One, is testing 30 different types of ads and seeing which one the advertisers vote most effective. The hope is that this will help to streamline some of the confusion among viewers caused by the current soup of video ad options and they incremental production costs incurred by advertisers (and publishers) every time they have to rework an ad for a new placement.
The preroll ad seems to hold a place of honor right now – it’s the one the other formats are being tested against, and it’s the one that Brightroll (an online video ad network) says is demanded by most of its clients. Brightroll’s chief, Tod Sacerdoti, wrote recently: “Pre-roll tends to outperform on nearly every metric tracked by advertisers—duration viewed, click-through rate, cost per view, brand lift, and change in purchase intent.”
The problem with preroll video ads is that Web video watchers are impatient, and may not sit through the preroll, especially to watch a video that may also be fairly short. And meanwhile YouTube seems to have demonstrated some significant sales results (23,000%!?) hawking Monty Python DVDs using clickable overlay ads over Monty Python video clips.
Check out this article on Business Week for details. Worth noting is a comment at the end in which the Steven Washer critiques the article for not mentioning the SMB market, which is certainly going to be a big player in online video, perhaps within the local search directory structure. He also warns against a monolithic group of big players stifling potential creativity and innovation of video offerings.
FIVE COMMON VIDEO AD TYPES
1. Pre-roll
2. Interactive
3. Overlay
4. Invitation
5. Companion
Tags: advertising, interactive advertising, online video
