A recent piece over on the E-consultancy site got me thinking. Good advertising happens when a good creative idea is delivered in a interesting and appropriate format in media that makes sense for the message. This is not rocket science – it has been happening since God was a boy.

Some of this is still getting figured out though for online video advertising. Unlike TV where depending upon location the ad is a 10/15/20/30 second long message or regular display advertising where a banner usually has to fit the IAB guidelines, there are maybe still too many variables when it comes to in-stream advertising that it is hard for the industry to get it’s head around them, what format, what length, pre/mid/post roll. Do you want companion banners? What if the video is played full-screen? How much interactivity should there be? Is it long-form or short form content? Is the content professionally produced? How many times should the user see the ad? Should we allow them to skip the ad after seeing it once? ad infinitum…

The best creative can often be found where the constraints are narrow – not broad, display advertising has come on leaps and bounds since the market figured out that having thousands of pop-ups was a bad thing. This has been a growing period during which the media owners have had to decide upon the value of their media and to try not to de-value it with too many ads. The creative teams have had to work with what they had and maximise the use of the space, the creative gallery from the IAB shows how this can work (although in my humble opinion the default answer of ‘pumping the majority of the effort into a microsite’ is a bit unadventurous). The media buyers often play a numbers game where they have to splat as many people as possible to get the required response rate but this is getting more focussed and targetted as the industry develops and advertisers get more sophisticated moving on from the altar of the click-through rate.

With in-player video advertising  (as opposed to in-banner) the different parties need to pull together to see what works, what doesn’t and what is the most efficient way to use the space, what constraints to impose and what metrics are important (check Dean Donaldson’s blog for more on that). Maybe when that is all decided upon we will be able to stop talking about the technology and the formats and start talking about the creative idea which is what good advertising should be about.