Ad content plasticity: Huh? Did I make that up? Uhhh…. yup. But it sounds important, doesn't it? The reason why television commercials work is because content is standardized from ad-to-show length. Online? You actively choose a piece of content you want to get and blam! Commercial. That 15-second pre-roll had three delays in it. Fetching it, inserting it and the gap before content. Result? You first waited 40 seconds before your one minute piece of content. The technology just, well, sucks. What do we need? A way to dynamically adjust your spot to varying lengths. That is what I mean by ad content plasticity. We need to be able to create a 30-second spot that can end at any point, still communicate what we need and then have the serving systems dynamically adjust. It's just that the "creatives" in offline don't think that way.
Consumer tolerance: Look, there's someone in this equation who is not the agency, or the client, or the vendor. Remember them? The person that actually uses your product? We create standards, but it's all a bunch of ego stroking. Those standards are created by people in our industry, for our own benefit. They try to act in the best interest of the consumer but are fearful of the power of those it affects. The 15-second pre-roll? Oh, come on! For pre-roll, I say five seconds. That's about all someone will tolerate, and you better give it to them in five seconds. Then figure out a way to do mid-roll so the consumer is getting the content they want first. Oh yeah, I forgot, our wonderful MPEG-4 standard would have to be re-encoded if we split it. Yup, again, technology preventing us from doing what is in the best interest of the consumer.
So what do you do?
If you are client-side running these programs, and you do measure correctly, and it's working, don't stop. But if you want to spend money in online video, just use your commercials and have the best impact -- try NBC Rewind. Immersive, long-form content wrapped with your brand, with the dual effect of commercials, banner exposure and persistence of ad exposure throughout. Now, that you can measure.
If you're on the agency side, figure out a way to get your creatives to think about it differently, and find a solution to ad content creation to make it more efficient. Don't present ideas that are going to have us shell out fees in perpetuity to some union.
If you're on the publisher side, ScanScout has a very promising technology that solves many of the issues I mentioned above. Check it out. And no, I don't own stock, and I don't work for them. As with NBC Rewind, I call it like I see it. Let's hope they -- or some other similar technology -- gets adopted as a standard, because pre-roll both sucks and blows.
In the end, until we solve the content creation bottleneck, figure out how to measure it and get the cost down to something that compares to large-format banners, or it just loses out on every metric.
Pre-roll is dead, long live something else but pre-roll, please.
Ranty rant signing off…
Sean X Cummings is director of marketing for Ask.com. Read full bio.