This week I’ve been checking out the video ad service Video Egg. By now we all know that video is a pretty powerful tool for getting your message across to a wide audience on the internet. That’s great news that hasn’t been lost on the advertising industry and their clients and video ads have subsequently become a fairly regular site on the internet landscape. You know the ones. There’s an animation or a video silently playing in a small window on a corner of a site like yahoo! and if you roll you mouse over you can hear the sound and sometimes the movie increases a little in size too. Nothing wrong with that so far. In fact I remember being pretty excited the first time I saw one. But….. if you weren’t keen on the video the chances are you’d roll your mouse off it quite quickly. Even worse if you accidentally rolled over the video with your mouse whilst trying to click on another link you often got an unwanted video crowding your screen – instantly putting you off that product and its irritating commercial.
Video Egg claim their ads give you an eggselent 13% more yolk for your buck
But where Video Egg got clever is by recognising that those ads were too much like TV. They saw that current video ads are just like when you get an annoying ad on the telly and you flip channels to escape it. Video Egg recognised that they weren’t dealing with TV, and stated that internet video ads need a solution tailored to the internet. In doing so they have taken video ads into a new league in terms of making sure people watch them and, crucially, stay watching. When you roll over an ad served up by Video Egg it gives you a nice 3-2-1 count down to warn you the ad is about to roll – so no more accidental brand damaging, hair-pulling-inducing pop-ups. The service also looks great. The video quickly expands to full screen without losing any quality (and it even looks pretty good while it’s loading up). But here’s the really cool part. When the full screen ad does load up the video isn’t just a video – it’s a rich media experience that hooks the viewer in. You usually have a selection of buttons that allow you to find out more information about the product or (in the case of movie trailers) an alternative video that you can immediately flip to. The effect (if I’m anything to go by) is to suck the viewer in and keep them watching the ad. According to Video Egg I’m not alone. They claim viewers watch their ads for13% longer compared to a standard web video ad.
It looks fantastic, it works well and it’s the future for a lot of video. Right now Video Egg are the leading guys at serving this style of ad, and they do it for high end clients with big budget ads (the likes of Warner Brothers, Canon and Volvo). But soon more companies- maybe even Video Egg themselves – will start producing this service for companies with a more limited budget and combined with cost effective professional video production rich media video ad serving may become as common as google adsense.
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