Why You Should Consider Pre-Roll Video Ads

Most of us can’t wait to click the “Skip Ad” as soon as we can when surfing on YouTube. As a business owner, you should be considering those five precious seconds before someone can skip your ad as an opportunity to build brand awareness – and if you are creative, an opportunity to drive real ROI.

The food order app, Eat 24, took a creative, different approach with its pre-roll ad, and the results were impressive:

  • 91 percent watched the whole ad
  • 1 percent click-thru rate
  • 75 percent increase in their App downloads

Their success story is the exception. It is estimated pre-rolls have a 94% skip rate. But is that because we really want to see the trending cat video, or because the advertiser wasn’t taking advantage of the opportunity and instead delivered something they used in a past TV ad or that was otherwise boring?

With the public’s increasing acceptance of short videos via Vine, Instagram, Snapchat and so forth, you should consider Pre-Roll Ads to be your next opportunity to provide your targeted audience a fun, informative and/or entertaining 5- to 15-second video ad that can be great for raising awareness, brand recognition, driving traffic, and engaging your audience in a rather precise and measurable way.

You can think of a YouTube pre-roll ads as being at the top of your video marketing funnel with the main goal to raise awareness and secondary goals to drive traffic to your website (from there, you also need a plan for what you want visitors to do next, but that is the topic of another post).

What do I mean about being creative?

First, it always begins with understanding your audience and how you target the ads on YouTube.

The next question to chew on is how you can deliver something of value to them in a quick way. When I say “something of value,” it doesn’t necessarily have to be business as usual coupons or whitepapers, etc. It can be entertaining like the Eat 24 ad. Or try something out-of-the-ordinary, as threatening to electrocute a puppy if the skipped the ad, and then reveal that you are donating the cost of the ad campaign to the SPCA. That is what one Rhode Island-based agency did when it attempted to create an “unskippable ad.”

Generally, it seems, the more successful pre-roll ads are entertaining and acknowledge that the viewer intended to see something else and you are in the way of that – at least for the next five seconds.

So far, we have learned to keep it short and keep it entertaining. The next thing is know is to keep it simple. The viewer is going to see at least five seconds. If they see more, you want them to click the ad to go to a specific landing page on your website. There isn’t a need to start reciting your phone number or other special information. All of that can be included on your landing page and what you want them to do once they are on your website.

Below are some additional creative spins on the Pre-Roll Ad. Let us know if you have any questions.