Pre-Roll Ads: I’m So Over You
Cal's had a lot more than 2,632 consecutive appearances on redsox.com
Pre-roll ads are nothing new to anyone who’s ever watched video on the web. You’re all fired up to watch an on-location reporter walk into a signpost or just catch up on that episode of the Office you missed, when all of a sudden the “all new completely redesigned 2009 Mazda 6″ crashes the party. It’s a 15-30 second nuisance at best, an outright betrayal of a site or platform’s user base at worst.
I’m usually one to avoid any video platform that serves pre-roll ads simply on principle, so I manage to dodge my fair share of them – which has kept my frustration from boiling over until now. The tipping point (if you believe in such a thing) for me was when I started coming face to face with Cal Ripken every single time I visited to the Red Sox site. It’s distracting, annoying, and frankly jarring to be blasted with a video (with sound!) that I didn’t authorize. Don’t get me wrong, Cal’s a great guy, and we haven’t hung out in a while (call me, buddy!), but these days I go out of my way to avoid him.
What I’m saying is that I will actually try to spend less than 1 second per visit to the site – just enough time to double check the starting time for the next game, not enough time for Cal’s video to load. This is bad news for MLB.com, whose other advertisers are not going to take kindly to the impact on pageviews and time-on-site metrics. Not only is Bank of America (whom Cal is endorsing) wasting a ton of their own money on one of the worst advertising experiences out there today, but they’re also reducing the value of the site to other sponsors — hardly a home run for MLB.com.
Offline, Tivo’s ubiquity has given traditional advertisers the same problems. Subway recently decided to buy themselves an entire reality TV show — on the Biggest Loser, contestants learn how to eat healthy by making a trip to Subway! (Fittingly, this video also sports a pre-roll ad). But overt pandering to brands decreases the value of content of the show, thus decreasing viewership — just as with MLB.com.
It strikes me that there’s a huge opportunity to shift the experience to something less intrusive and more engaging for users in a way that doesn’t devalue the content provided. We think we’re onto something over at Brand Networks, but I’ll open it up to the mob:
What do you think will replace pre-roll advertising, and how will that impact companies slow to move away from a “30-second spot” mentality?
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