Lights, camera, advertisment ..!

There seem to be daily announcements about online video advertising, Google being the latest to announce that they are going to sell video ads. This is clearly going to be a massive market, but the dominant format seems to be the clumsy 'pre-roll' where an ad is played before the clip the viewer wants to watch.

For all its faults, there's a good reason why traditional television advertising has been reasonably successful - it is cleverly scheduled.

I, for one, believe that the pre-roll will do more damage than good as advertisers try to shove content into viewers' screens.

The average viewing time on pre-roll clips is around fifteen minutes; however, the average viewing time for more traditional, scheduled ads (especially when put into short 30 sec breaks) is almost forty minutes.

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