A Comment about Pre-Roll Video Ads

Reading this post by Greg Sterling on the paradox of video pre-roll and these two on ClickZ here (pre-roll wins…) and here (… making them work) reminded me about something that I heard recently…  And as online video watching continues to explode (on the likes of YouTube, the Olympics, Funny or Die, etc etc) these issues will become important for the online ad industry. I’ve got to think that the pre/mid/post roll video formats will be the wave of growth to ride us out of the current predicted ad down turn. Anyway, I digress…

Back to the meeting with the online video player – they produce channels, widgets, etc for sports teams that effectively become online channels for live and pre-recorded video content. Anyway, someone in the meeting said a smart and very simple thing – they had found that for online video ads (pre, mid and post roll) they found these performed much better (ie – users engaged and interacted more) when ads were not inserted in every play. They had been experimenting with various formulas but that around a 1 in 3 (33%) insertion ratio seemed to work pretty well. Seems like common sense and a similar to how banners and rich media respond. Sounds like its time for A Fuller View to come up with some ‘rules’ or best practice tips for video ads… Maybe later, time to go back to watching the Olympics on NBC.