Video Ads Go in Line, in Time

Written by Gary Stein
For advertisers and their agencies, the notion of video on the Web has
long been an exciting but uneasy topic. In the early days, video was
exciting and new, but nearly impossible to deliver. File formats
conflicted with pretty much every site, and download speeds
practically ensured that no one would ever see more that a jumpy
bunch of half-drawn frames. But the technology on both the serving
and the receiving end got better quickly. Advertisers can now be
pretty sure the videos they put up can be viewed.

That leaves the problem of whether they would be seen. For a long
time, the reality has been that people weren't going online to look at
stuff. They were going online to do stuff. This is why this industry
is called "interactive marketing". Certainly the interactive part has
something to do with technology. But mostly, "interactive marketing"
means marketing where there's an ongoing, evolving, deepening
give-and-take between a consumer and a brand.

Watching a video isn't necessarily a give-and-take experience, which
is central to advertisers' struggle. That is, technology got better,
consumers got interested, and video began to take off. Consumers were
watching videos online. Advertisers soon followed and quickly muddied
the experience with pre- and post-roll ads and ads within the video
itself.

If you tried either pre- or post-roll, you're probably familiar with
the problems. Pre-roll ads, unless they're highly relevant to the
video the consumer chose to watch, annoy people. So much so, that
people tend to bail on the whole video rather than sit through the
ad. Post-roll is even worse. Again, unless this ad is highly
relevant, no one is sticking around to see it.

The third solution, to put the ad into the video itself, seems
anathema to the medium. Interrupting content to show an ad was
precisely the way most interactive gurus denigrated traditional
advertising. To show ads in the middle of content, in a way that's
out of the user's control, was just wrong, wrong, wrong.

But within the last several months, we seem to have gotten it at last:
place the ads within the video player frame. YouTube announced last
week that it will begin offering a very clever ad execution that
places a small strip at the bottom of certain videos, offering a
message and a chance to click for more content. VideoEgg has been
offering much the same thing for a long time now. The ad is a bit
more consistent in the VideoEgg examples, but the idea is totally on
target.

As YouTube's implementation of the inline ad takes hold of the market,
we'll see how successful this approach can be. It offers a lot of
promise. First, they're on target with consumer expectations of not
only the medium but of advertising's place in it. There seems to be a
cardinal rule that exists online: no one should ever see an ad unless
she has specifically requested to see that ad.

Sure, you can argue people don't request to see banners, but you can
also argue banners are really invitations to see the real ad (whether
that ad is a video, a rich media experience, or just a landing page).
The inline ad, however, follows that cardinal rule. It invites you to
engage further, but that's all. In fact, it goes away, never to be
heard from again, if you don't touch it.

Second, inline ads don't disrupt and barely distract. With both the
YouTube and VideoEgg executions, the ads never take people away from
the content they're watching permanently. Instead, they offer a
separate bit of content that can be consumed distinctly; the original
video is paused. Think about your own browsing habits: most likely
you're constantly hopping back and forth between multiple pieces of
content. The path consumers are asked to take through these ads is
deeply familiar.

Lastly, inline ads don't need to be limited to video. The line between
a video and a rich media experience is blurring daily, and inline
video units can take advantage of this new space. The click on an
inline video ad unit can take the viewer to a rich experience with
interactivity, games, and who knows what else. Which will be the
first brand to sell something in this space?

Whatever the immediate results are from these initial forays into
inline video advertising, we can look forward to a new video
advertising option. Shoot, in advertising in general. More and more
content will be delivered digitally in the coming years. You can
already watch YouTube via the AppleTV player, in your living room.
This online format -- one that takes the notion of interactivity to
heart -- may have life outside of Web sites.