I'm in the market for a new car. I think I'm picking it up today actually.
I did a fair amount of research. Many thanks to my friend Emil for the various pointers.
And fortunately except for our actual test drive, everything else was online.
But along the way, I was reminded how much I hate the standard pre-roll ad unit. I know ad agencies & advertisers love the pre-roll. It's the status quo. And they get to recycle tv ads spots.
The worst offender in my book is Cnet. Yes, they have pretty cool video clips. But the clips are 1 minute long. And the ad is technically 15 seconds but it feels so much longer since there is noticeable delay before and after the pre-roll. Blech.
Lots of folks are trying to find an alternative to the standard pre-roll. I'm going to take a wait and see attitude but they really still feel like banners moved from the header and stuck into the video stream.
I had breakfast with my friend Will Richmond today. We were talking about the challenges of the standard pre-roll and the obvious problems when you force people to watch an ad like TWC is trying to do. In my view, forcing your consumers to do something is a bad idea.
I asked Will about my simple idea. How about a 15 second preroll but after 2-3 seconds the user has the ability to fast forward or close/skip the ad. If the ad intrigues me I'll watch it. If not I'm gone anyway. I'm never going to buy a pickup truck so why show it to me over and over again.
Will wasn't crazy about my idea. But I'm hoping someone gives it a try.
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