Review of Video Advertising Methods and Formats
For any advertising method to be effective, it has to have a target audience that is consuming the medium with which the advertising is attached to. That being said, advertisers are starting to realize that online video advertising is now an effective method to attract large relevant audiences. Online video consumption has grown tremendously in the past few years and as a result, video sharing and video search companies are poised to reap the benefits of video advertising.
Because of the keen interest of the advertisers towards the online video segment, many video sharing sites have been encouraged to come up with different formats for the placement of video advertisements. The quantum of investment in this segment has fueled innovation of the methods in which video sites are deploying online video monetization and advertising programs. In-stream (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) advertisement formats have been in existence longest and have produced a good share of revenue for online video content producers.
Pre-Roll Format – Ads, typically videos in duration of 15 or 30 seconds are streamed before the video itself plays. This make the advertising incredibly prominent but causes plenty of issues with regard to user friendliness and many studies show this format to be unpopular with users.
Post-roll Video Ads: In post-roll ads, just like pre-roll, a 15 or 30 sec clip is streamed at the end of a video itself. This is usually launched in conjunction with pre-roll as well as often times, the advertiser never gets their ad seen as users most often only watch part of the video.
Mid-Roll Video Ads: Again, like the other in-stream ads, mid-roll streams a short video clip within the video player itself, only with mid-stream, the ad gets played in the middle of the video almost like a normal TV commercial. This seems to be somewhat less offensive to users.
Some of the video sites have started experimenting with different formats like, in-player banners: In-player ads sometimes include relevant text or image advertisements in the space available in video player between the outer margin of the video and the inner margin of the video player.
The buzz in the past year has been with regard to a newer method of video ad delivery that attempts to match relevance by choosing video ads to run with only video that is similar in subject. This is known as contextual video advertising and it can take on a range of different formats with images or text being displayed within a portion of the video window, only being activated when clicked on.
Some of the video sites like to go through the video and include only relevant in-video text advertisements, which match the contents of the video and at the same time it does not disturb the process of video watching by the viewer. Youtube was one of the first sites to adopt this format as a standard and it is called Overlay Video Ads.
These are some of the popular and in-use video formats at the present time. But the work is still going on for the development of the new video formats for the future and no real standard has been set. It will be quite interesting to see what the leaders in this space come up with next.
Filed under: Internet Marketing