Mediaboss Marketing

The 30-second pre-roll is the blink tag of our era. It's the ad format that drives users crazy, and it's just not right for Web or mobile. Here's how to fix video advertising and make online video profitable for everyone.

Don't hate them because they're 30 seconds long.

Video is moving to the Web in enormous leaps; the promise of online video seems to be at our doorstep. Millions are cutting the cord, beloved television shows are returning through the seemingly divine intervention of online distribution, and people are consuming Web and mobile video in increasingly staggering numbers.

But all that video consumption is saddled with a burden that's keeping it from reaching its full potential: the ads just haven't caught up.

You all know the problem I'm talking about, and yes, you've seen it on our own site -- on videos hosted by me, and probably even the video embedded in this blog post. You want to watch a video on the Web, and before you can get to that video, you're faced with a 30-second ad that you can't fast-forward or skip.

In some cases, the content itself may be only a couple of minutes long, so the ad represents a huge time commitment relative to the length of the clip. And before you can move on to the next two-minute video, you might have to watch the same ad all over again. Result: you're angry at the publisher, you're angry at the advertiser, and everyone's brand takes a hit. The publisher and the advertiser haven't made an ad "impression" -- they've made an enemy.

We used to refuse to take 30-second ads in the earliest days of CNET TV, but even with 15-second ads, there are issues: the biggest one is repetition. If you watch three or four videos online, or watch a day of live programming like our CES coverage or the Holiday Help Desk marathons we used to do, you'll see the same ad three or four or 20 times. The result: brand rage.

I've been producing and hosting digital video for almost seven years now, and in that time, our feedback inboxes have constantly been full of complaints about the duration, frequency, and redundancy of ads, and believe me, I feel your pain daily. I'm a consumer, too -- in fact, I probably consume a lot more CNET TV than most people, and it's not like we have a magical in-house mechanism for skipping ads! I feel it when I watch YouTube, Hulu, video on other sites like Yahoo and CNN; virtually everywhere video appears online.

The question of digital video advertising is especially relevant now. According to Comscore, Americans watched an all-time high of more than 8.3 billion video ads in March, as they consumed almost 37 billion videos--some 21 hours per month of online video content.

The issue will only get more acute as video goes mobile -- and it is going mobile, and quickly. Cisco estimates that 70 percent of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2016, and it was already 52 percent of traffic at the end of 2011.

See more here:
For digital video to live, the 30-second pre-roll ad must die