Pre-roll Video Advertising
Have you ever clicked on a video you want to watch online and was surprised by a short video ad that was played before the video you selected? This type of ad is known as “pre-roll video ads” and has become the fastest and most effective ad form online. Instead of spending the time and money to create an online video ad, hoping someone will find through this video, pre-roll video advertising ensures that your ad receives views. Though the idea started with smaller sites, the largest video service providers, including YouTube and Hulu, use pre-roll video ads to promote new products and ideas.
Pre-roll video advertising is designed in advance for compatibility with VAST 2.0. The benefit of ensuring your Internet content is on VAST is that you will be able to place your ad on more websites, allowing more advertising opportunities. Pre-roll video advertising can also be designed in advance to accommodate vPaid, helping to unify communications between video players and video content that customers want to see. Unlike TV ads, pre-roll video ads can include an interactive feature that allows customers to move to another site to learn more. Advertisers notice the trend – the poll indicated that more than 50% of advertisers plan to spend money on interactive video ads instead of other types of online advertising.
Some advertisers prefer to run their ads along with the broadcast content. Pre-roll video advertising appears on the video surface and are placed above the video content, usually at the bottom of one corner of the screen. They appear repeatedly before the video starts, in the middle of it, and after finishing without covering the images. At the same time, non-overlapping ads appear outside the screen even though they remain within the video player. Pre-roll video advertising may cover this part of the screen where subtitles and annotations usually appear in videos in a foreign language. Of course, video ads allow users to close, skip, and expand to fit the entire screen.
While the benefits of pre-roll video ads are easy to see, more research is needed to come up with a pre-roll video strategy that makes your ad something customers want to act on. Many companies simply choose to play fifteen or thirty second commercial ads that have been developed for television. The problem with this method is that many consumers say that they did not act after watching the pre-roll advertising because they were not aware of what the company wanted to do. Other people simply ignored the ad altogether.
Remind customers that they enjoy pre-roll video advertising more than any other format. The main idea is that interactive video advertising gives customers a reason to learn more about your company. There are many ways to encourage viewers to click through, with the most successful ideas that allow customers to click and to receive a special offer from contest entries to printable coupons.
Regardless of how you choose to use Pre-roll video advertising for your company, it’s clear that this type of ad has made a big splash in the online media world. If you’re thinking about using pre-roll video ads to promote your company, be sure to spend some time thinking about why viewers might want to click on your ad and design a campaign with these ideas.
