del.icio.us
blinklist
digg
Facebook
Furl
ma.gnolia
Newsvine
Pownce
reddit
StumbleUpon
Technorati
Twitter
For any advertising method to be effective, it has to have a target audience that is consuming the medium with which the advertising is attached to. That being said, advertisers are starting to realize that online video advertising is now an effective method to attract large relevant audiences. Online video consumption has grown tremendously in the past few years and as a result, video sharing and video search companies are poised to reap the benefits of video advertising.
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 Video Ads: In post-roll ads, just like pre-roll, a 15 or 30 sec clip is streamed at the end of a video itself. This is usually launched in conjunction with pre-roll as well as often times, the advertiser never gets their ad seen as users most often only watch part of the 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.
Some of the video sites have started experimenting with different formats like, in-player banners: 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.
Some of the video sites like to go through the video and include only relevant in-video text advertisements, which match the contents of the video and at the same time it does not disturb the process of video watching by the viewer. Youtube was one of the first sites to adopt this format as a standard and it is called Overlay Video Ads.
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.