new media age: Advertisers develop bespoke online video ads for success, says Virgin Media
21 May 2012
Advertisers must think of video pre-roll advertising as an entirely separate entity, rather than another platform for TV ads, according to Virgin Media, which has just launched an interactive online campaign created by ad tech company Collective.
The campaign uses pre-roll creative from Virgin Media’s campaign featuring David Tennant with an interactive overlay ad running across the bottom of the screen highlighting Virgin Media Collections packages.
When viewers click on the overlay the ad expands across the screen to reveal further product information.
The ad format is designed to increase engagement, which Fiona Low, Virgin Media head of digital and social media, said is the biggest challenge when it comes to reaching consumers through online pre-roll.
“You have a much lighter TV audience in much richer environments, so the inherent challenge for pre-roll is how you disrupt the viewer so they engage with your ad.”
This can be done through targeting, creative and messaging, she said, or a combination all three, adding “the key to overcoming this challenge is to think about pre-roll not as a playout of your TV ad, but instead by considering it as an entirely different script.”
She said the benefit of the Collective format is the ability to combine overlays, display and pre-roll into one overall digital plan, which will help it to determine whether it has an incremental impact on engagement.
The idea is to grab the consumer’s attention via a video, then open up a dialogue that challenges them to stop, think and click to find out more information.
The campaign uses a combination of behavioural, contextual, demographic and site data from Virgin Media, Collective and publishers to serve ads from one of four product categories. Consumers who are more likely to stream and download content but don’t have Virgin Media broadband, for example, will be shown ads for Virgin Media broadband.
The ads will run until the end of June across publisher sites including WWE, IPC, The Independent and Bauer.
Source: Lucy Tesseras for NMA
