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Sunday, February 01, 2009

Video Advertising Overview - Video AD Methods and Formats

By Mark Robertson

As we all have been reading, online video consumption growth rates have soared over the past year especially due to broadband growth and penetration. As a result, video sharing and video search website have realize a much stronger traffic scenario whereby advertisers and marketers are spending and are poised to spend just short of $1billion in online video advertising this year.

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 Video Ads: Pre roll advertisements start before the video begins and the viewer has to sit through the entire advertisement, if he does not want to rely on chances, rather wants to ensure that ha can watch every single second of the video from its beginning.

Post-roll Ads - This format includes the advertisements at the end of the video clip and it is up to the viewer to decide whether to watch the advertisement clip or not. This format of advertisement is being used by certain video sites. However, this is not effective for the advertiser as often times users dont watch the entire video.

Mid-Roll Format - With mid-rolls, a short clip is streamed in the middle (sometimes every X minutes) of video content that is playing. This tends to be less annoying to users as they are acustomed to this format in television advertising.

Many of the video platforms have experimented with various different online video formats. One of these is in-player ads: 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.

One of the most promising video advertisement formats is contextual advertising which attempts to match advertisements with the most relevant content and visa-versa. This ad itself can take of various different forms, in-video banners, lower-thirds, and contextual text overlay advertisements. The nice thing about this particular method is that it does not disturb the viewing of the video and it responds only when the viewer clicks on it.

Of all the various experiments with contextual video advertising, one format has taken off and has even become the standard video advertising format that YouTube and many other sites have adopted instead of pre-roll ads. This format is known as the Overlay ad and it is basically a contextually relevant text ad that is shown in a portion of the player and does not annoy users as much as in-stream advertising.

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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