Pre-Roll Is Online Video's Short-Term Solution

Online video has grown by leaps and bounds, but marketers are still
trying to figure out how best to exploit it - with video ad spend
constituting merely 0.6 percent of TV ad budgets this year, though the
online audience for it is about two-thirds the size of TV, David
Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, points out.

What online video marketing models will succeed may not yet be clear,
but the currently dominant pre-roll approach is likely not the best
answer in the long term, writes ClickZ citing speakers at Ad:Tech in
New York last week. More than 90 percent of pre-roll inventory has
been typically sold out at any given time this year, and it will
likely stay so for a while as marketers simply run their TV spots as
pre-roll ads.

They do so, because it's the path of least resistance toward
transitioning online, which is what major marketers finally want to
do, according to Janet Balis, SVP of sales development for AOL Media
Networks. She says savvier marketers are to more gracefully integrate
brand into online content via product placement and sponsorships.

Google is also looking for alternatives to pre-roll and has instead
tested persistent branding ads above the video content and 15-second
post-roll ads, according to Daniel Blackman, strategic partner for
development at Google Video.

Citing the success of contextual text ads, he says "users respond to
less intrusive, more relevant, targeted ads," and the challenge is to
apply a similar approach to online video.