Pre-Roll and Beyond: Video Advertising Insights by Format

Editor's Notes

• #7: Depending on your goals, functionality such as store locators, data collection, coupon downloads, dynamic retail circulars, and ad sharing can be used. Soon you will be able to incorporate virtually any functionality of a web site within an interactive pre-roll. Companies like PointRoll and Innovid are doing great work in this area for marketers and moving the entire industry forward. However, while the early results have been very promising, these formats are still in the experimental stage, with greater scale coming on everyday as the technical standards are adopted. I encourage anyone investing in web video to test these new formats to learn what works for your brand. And even more importantly, to have your voice and unique brand needs be considered as these solutions evolve. At this point it’s not “if” this is coming, it’s “how quickly?”. So Pre-Roll is great and well positioned for the future, but there is much more to video than Pre-Roll…
• #9: It opened a few months ago and it demonstrates the power of auto play video can have even with no sound. Similar things are being done in out of home digital screens in malls and airports across the country. Anyone in the room who has walked through the American Airlines terminal at JFK over the past year has probably seen the ExxonMobil Clean Energy auto play video in the underground corridor that links the terminals. This is another good example of video that works without sound. We know we are working with a much different screen size, but these same principles should be applied to auto play web video as well. (silent pause, to let that sink in)
• #11: One way is within social games and apps. What happening in this space is very interesting. Facebook games and apps are turning out to show some of the biggest promise and best results, especially for longer form video. The way this works is that in order to enhance your experience with a game or application, users need seeds for their farm, dresses for there mall world, or food for their pets. They can get these in one of a few ways. They can buy it, they can purchase a direct marketing offer like a sub to Netflix or a trip to Disney World, or they can watch a video.These formats are all user initiated and Click to Play. Within the game, a user has the opportunity to click on a text link or image with a call to action to watch a brand video. When they click, a secondary window appears that qualifies the users. From there the user clicks again and the player appears. And then they click to play the video. So the video play is qualified by 3 clicks to start the video. Now the user does not have to stay with the video all the way through to earn their credit. Up until now, each of the developers would issue there own credits. In July Facebook is taking this over and will be the only issuer of credits on their platform. We expect this is going to open the floodgates as users will want to earn Facebook credits that will have real monetary value and can be used for ecommerce shopping as opposed to just game play which is the case now. Now this may not be right for every brand but it does make sense for brands that want to reach Facebook users on the Facebook platform when they are in a social sharing mode. You may also be thinking I don’t want my video in an incentivized environment. Keep in mind preroll and television video is incentivized. The user is incentivized to watch the advertiser content to get to the video they have requested.Now let’s take a deeper look into what’s going on and compare these formats with data.
• #17: Here’s a look at the trade off in terms of actual play time in terms of cost per view. You see Click to Play In Banner formats achieving the longest play time, that’s time the user is spending with your video message. However this comes at a significantly higher price point than Pre-Roll. This increase in Play Time is due to the fact that a lot of the in-banner video is used for longer form video and not just repurposed television :15s and :30s. And what about completions rate and post view interactions like sharing?
• #19: And lastly, when it comes to post view interaction rates we are seeing more activities such as sharing occurring at a higher rate on in-banner and in-game placements. Which makes sense, because currently most preroll runs with nothing more than Click Through. However, this is changing fast.What about the creative itself? What’s the difference in brand impact if I use my repurposed TV spot or made-for-web video?
• #21: When it comes to web video and all that great made-for-web video where brands invest a lot of money and creative resources, and then post on YouTube and their own brand.com websites…. brands need to do more to actually get these videos watched. Just because you upload to YouTube and your own site, this does not mean it will get watched. With 24 hours of video being posted to YouTube every minute, this problem of discovery is getting worse. You now have the formats and opportunity to invest in solutions that get your video watched, no matter what the length and who you are trying to reach.