Pre-Roll Ads Are On a Roll

Pre-roll video ads now account for a significant share of all online video advertising

It’s an inevitable outgrowth of Web 2.0 and points the way to Web 3.0: Online video is big and getting bigger – projected by eMarketer to reach 77% of all Internet users and account for 15% of all online advertising spending in three years. Some estimates have pegged pre-roll ads as accounting for 90%+ of all video advertising already.

For an advertiser pressing into this new frontier, determining ideal length of a pre-roll ad can be a quandary. Research has shown that longer ads, of 30 seconds or more, run a higher risk of encouraging a would-be viewer to closing out of the player before the program even has begun. For example, Yume estimates the completion rate of a 30-second pre-roll video ad is 64% vs. 77% for an ad that is only 15 seconds.

However, there is a trade-off. The average click-through rate of a 15-second ad is 1.2%, Yume says, but 1.8% for a 30-second ad. Further, studies have shown that viewer recollection of ad content increases in proportion to the length of the ad.

At Meister Media, where we’re just beginning production of pre-roll video ads using our Studio M, we’ve found something of a comfortable compromise at 20 seconds. Here's one of our first pre-rolls, written and produced completely in-house for chemical and seed company DuPont Crop Protection and just recently posted to Meister’s website GrowingProduce.com.