ChasNote

From Mediapost.

According to Nielsen’s latest study, viewers are watching video online and on mobile devices. Shocking! And Nielsen suggests advertisers run pre-rolls, a format that roughly follows the television formula (and, by the way, pre-rolls are easier for measurement companies to track). Shocking again!!

“Larry Gerbrandt, senior vice president, general manager of Nielsen Analytics, also made a plug for pre-roll ads in the report. Such ads ‘are potentially superior to existing models because they can take full advantage of the digital environment,’ he said in a statement. He also touted the ability to disable online fast-forwarding.

“But some in the online media industry disagree with him about both the benefits of pre-roll and whether forcing consumers to sit through an ad is a good idea. Google, for one, has gone on record as saying that pre-roll ads tend to make for a bad user experience. Too, Curt Hecht, chief digital officer at Starcom MediaVest Group’s GM Planworks, suggested at a conference last December that the less intrusive** post-roll format could ultimately become a more successful model than pre-rolls.”

**I’m not sure Curt is after something less “intrusive,” or rather a video-ad experience that has more impact because it’s more “integrated.” Integrated marketing works best if the brand fits naturally into the programming, whether that’s an opportunity for product placement (eg, “The official beer of Diggnation”) or a brand that’s open to working with the programmers around messaging (eg, Howard Stern-style “live reads” for Heineken). The collateral benefit of this is that it drives greater relevance – a better fit between the marketer and the audience – naturally; it’s very tough to make it work if the brand doesn’t below in that particular setting. The unsolved challenge, though: How do we make integrated video marketing scalable as viewership fragments across more and more programming choices?