Pre-roll was a bad idea from the start. It was lazy traditional thinking encroaching on an innovative medium. Here’s why.

Online pre-roll video is dead. Okay, maybe not dead, but it has checked into a roach motel. Wow, did we screw this one up. All of us. I have received a lot of calls lately from media properties talking about all the extra inventory they have for pre-roll. And the prices dropped again! Wow, isn’t that great? I’m reminded of something a friend told me once when we saw a sales sign in a shop window: “2 for 1 Suits.” He said: “If they really wanted to screw you, they’d give you three of them.”

You see, it’s not just about the cost. So what happened? Numerous things, but they boil down to five points:

1. How the client end is managing the buy
2. How it is measured
3. Ad content
4. Ad content plasticity
5. Consumer tolerance

Now, you may be sitting there reading this and thinking I’m insane and that your programs are great, but I’ll just tackle those points and let you make up your own mind. Oh hell, no I won’t, I’m right, just listen. I can sum up all five points easily.

Who is managing
A lot of companies made their initial foray into pre-roll through the traditional side of their business; their offline agency trying to encroach on digital. They had the commercial assets and weren’t giving them up easily. “Hey, we can use the television commercial and just put it in front of content online.” Done.

How it’s measured
How are you going to measure it? “Oh, it’s about branding.” Pa-lease. As I’ve said before, if you are not going to measure, and it exists online, don’t do it. At least measure the branding impact if you’re going to use that cop-out. Dynamic Logic, ever heard of it? And if not that, then Insight Express? Cookie viewers and measure post-view to your site over a week, and then pop your own survey to those that were cookied — ’cause trust me, if they didn’t come within a week, it didn’t do your brand any good. And that’s where the shift happened. The buys shifted to those who were controlling the online media plan — the ROI side of things. Once you remove the “branding” escape clause, for many people it just didn’t make sense.

Ad content
Let’s face it, the ad content sucked. And for the most part, it never got better. Developing web-specific video content is still expensive. Agencies haven’t figured out how to do guerilla production, and they charge too much. The time frames take longer to create, and then you have SAG or some other rights agency sucking out more of the budget. It’s fine when you’re spending millions in TV but absolutely nightmarish for online. Unless it is going to be a massive ongoing effort, the cost benefit analysis just doesn’t work. So what do you? You slap that 15-second spot up and call it a day.

Ad content plasticity
Huh? Did I make that up? Uhhh…. yup. But it sounds important, doesn’t it? The reason why television commercials work is because content is standardized from ad-to-show length. Online? You actively choose a piece of content you want to get and blam! Commercial. That 15-second pre-roll had three delays in it. Fetching it, inserting it and the gap before content. Result? You first waited 40 seconds before your one minute piece of content. The technology just, well, sucks. What do we need? A way to dynamically adjust your spot to varying lengths. That is what I mean by ad content plasticity. We need to be able to create a 30-second spot that can end at any point, still communicate what we need and then have the serving systems dynamically adjust. It’s just that the “creatives” in offline don’t think that way.

Consumer tolerance
Look, there’s someone in this equation who is not the agency, or the client, or the vendor. Remember them? The person that actually uses your product? We create standards, but it’s all a bunch of ego stroking. Those standards are created by people in our industry, for our own benefit. They try to act in the best interest of the consumer but are fearful of the power of those it affects. The 15-second pre-roll? Oh, come on! For pre-roll, I say five seconds. That’s about all someone will tolerate, and you better give it to them in five seconds. Then figure out a way to do mid-roll so the consumer is getting the content they want first. Oh yeah, I forgot, our wonderful MPEG-4 standard would have to be re-encoded if we split it. Yup, again, technology preventing us from doing what is in the best interest of the consumer.

So what do you do?

If you are client-side running these programs, and you do measure correctly, and it’s working, don’t stop. But if you want to spend money in online video, just use your commercials and have the best impact — try NBC Rewind. Immersive, long-form content wrapped with your brand, with the dual effect of commercials, banner exposure and persistence of ad exposure throughout. Now, that you can measure.

If you’re on the agency side, figure out a way to get your creatives to think about it differently, and find a solution to ad content creation to make it more efficient. Don’t present ideas that are going to have us shell out fees in perpetuity to some union.

If you’re on the publisher side, ScanScout has a very promising technology that solves many of the issues I mentioned above. Check it out. And no, I don’t own stock, and I don’t work for them. As with NBC Rewind, I call it like I see it. Let’s hope they — or some other similar technology — gets adopted as a standard, because pre-roll both sucks and blows.

In the end, until we solve the content creation bottleneck, figure out how to measure it and get the cost down to something that compares to large-format banners, or it just loses out on every metric.

Pre-roll is dead, long live something else but pre-roll, please.

Ranty rant signing off…