Is the Pre-Roll the new Pop-Up?

Back in the late ’90s the interactive advertising industry discovered a way to place an ad in front of the user by spawning a new window and having this window include a large rectangular unit or even a full Web page. This wonderful little unit was called “the pop-up,” and very quickly became the ad unit of choice for such products as the X-10 Camera. The pop-up quickly became oversaturated, with significant backlash from consumers, who said these units were annoying, intrusive and invasive. There was a dramatic drop in their effectiveness, and pop-ups were thus relegated to the background, with only a few direct-response advertisers still using them.

Today a similar debate rages on surrounding the pre-roll. Advertisers love the idea of a pre-roll because it offers a captive audience that has self-selected to interact with content. The unit is similar in fashion to advertisers’ beloved TV commercials, though typically shorter in length and accompanied many times by a display unit. However, the pre-roll can be just as invasive and just as annoying when taken to the extreme of being placed in advance of any and all video content. This time around, advertisers are much more wary of a full-scale implementation of this type of unit, and rightfully so. This unit represents a significant shift forward for online advertising, and to overuse it now would be detrimental to the business moving forward. If there’s a consumer backlash over advertising’s integration into the online video experiences, the business could suffer dramatically.

There are a number of alternatives to the pre-roll, and there are a number of ways to limit how it is utilized. The first is timing and frequency. If you are going to use pre-roll on your site, limit the length to 15 seconds or less, and put in place a frequency for exposure; maybe every third or fourth video view, the user can be shown a pre-roll. I’ve even heard whispers of companies trying a 3-second tag in advance of the video, with a full-length unit later on. It’s a sort of “brought to you by” message and certainly has merit.

The second option is not to use the pre-roll, but focus on the mid-roll, which runs during the content, or post-roll, which runs after the content. Obviously the mid-roll would be better for exposures than a post-roll, but when looking to implement a mid-roll unit you should also consider frequency and you should also consider the length of the video itself. If the video is less than 2 minutes long, you should not run a 30-second spot. Fifteen seconds might be acceptable, but you still need to anticipate the user reaction. I heard rumors that Joost was using mid-rolls, which are most similar to standard commercials, but that they would vary when the units run rather than be run in pre-determined ad pods. It’s an interesting thought, especially given that these units cannot be fast-forwarded.

The accompanying display unit is also very important, as this lends a longer-term opportunity to the exposure and a chance for a click-through that might not otherwise be available. Many sites use many sizes, and there are many ways to manage rotation, etc., but this unit seems to be a strongly accepted option from the consumer perspective.

You’ve likely heard a lot about “hot-spotting” — where an element of the video is programmed to be clickable. This is very cool technology, but not yet highly understood by the consumer. There will likely be more usage of this as the technology progresses, but it remains to be seen how effective it will be.

The other unit I have heard about is a stop-unit. Whenever the video is paused or stopped, a fixed unit comes in over the video rather than the paused thumbnail of the video. When the video is played again, the unit goes away and the video continues. I find this unit very interesting, and it could be easily accepted by the market.

All these formats have been tested in different combinations over the last few months, and each has its own plusses and minuses. You should expect that while performance on the various formats will be strong, still some users will always complain. But if industry members are patient and test and share the data on performance with one another, then I feel confident that we will come to a positive place where online video will remain a strong advertising opportunity for brands and services.

By Cory Treffiletti
Courtesy of http://www.mediapost.com