Thursday, August 28, 2008

Overview of Online Video Advertising Formats

By Mark Robertson of ReelSEO.com


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.

Due to the overwhelming demand from advertisers to develop effective methods for online video advertising delivery, some of the online video sharing giants have implemented various forms of online video ad formats. Historically, in-stream ads, also known as pre-roll ads, mid-roll, and post-roll, have been the dominant standard in terms of the format most advertisers gravitated towards due to the prominence of the ad content itself.

Pre-Roll Ads - In this format of advertising, the advertisement clip is inserted before the actual video and while playing the video, the advertisement clip is played first and the viewer is compelled to watch the advertisement before the start of the real video file.

Post-roll Format - In post-roll, just like the other in-stream ad formats, a short clip is played and streamed within the player at the end of the video stream itself. This is not as desired by advertisers as they know that many users never watch a video all the way until the end.

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.

As stated earlier, due to the demand, many of these video websites have begun to test and offer new, innovative ad solution for video. One of these experimental format is the In-Player ad: With in-player ads the player skin itself can be used to place relevant images or text content for the advertiser so that the ad is displayed for the entire time that the video is played.

Contextual in-video advertising seems to be the way of the future with many different sites attempting to match videos with advertisements that are most relevant to the subject matter. Users like this format more as well as it does not disturb the experience of watching the entire video. This quality of the format makes it one of the most promising advertising formats for the future and there are many diverse ways in which to serve either images, clips, or text ads.

One of the most popular version of contextual video advertising is that of what is known as the "overlay ad." In this format, relevant textual ads are scrolled or displayed across a small portion of the video screen (usually the bottom). Users in particular prefer this format as it is relatively unobtrusive.

I have given you a brief overview of the most common formats of video ads that are being tested and utilized at the moment. That being said, with growth being what it is, and video discovery as new as it is, we will certainly see many different companies innovating in regards to developing new and exciting formats for online video advertising.

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