Online advertisers know they need to play nice or risk having their ads filtered out before they’ve even had a chance to load. That goes double for video ads, as viewers find auto-play videos especially grating. Into this new reality programmatic video company Cedato has launched IntentView, starting what could be a new wave of intent-based advertising.
“Intent-based” means the ad only plays when the viewer shows some indication they want it to play. That doesn’t only mean clicking. Look at this demo page created by Cedato to see how this instream video ad format works. A few seconds after viewers click to play the main video in the editorial column, a smaller picture-in-picture displays in the top left of the video player. This thumbnail is the IntentView ad. If viewers click it, it plays immediately. It will also play if the viewer mouses over it for three solid seconds. That’s a way of showing intent. If no intent occurs, the ad quickly disappears.
Once the IntentView ad starts it takes over the video player. Viewers can still back out, as a Skip Ad button appears on the right side after five seconds. This is a format that’s serious about only playing when wanted. Once the ad is done, the main video continues playing from the exact same spot.
Publishers will love that they only pay for initiated views. In testing, Cedato says the format delivered a 50 to 90 percent lift in completion rates.
“Video ad intrusiveness has been discussed a lot as a concern for advertisers and publishers, so we wanted to come up with an ad solution which would be more considerate of user experience,” explains Cedato COO Yair Miranda. “We did some research and we found that users would respond better to ads that were more considerate of them, and therefore IntentView only launches if the user shows intent by engaging with the ad by hovering over it.”
Thanks to those higher engagement rates, Miranda says, customers have been happy with IntentView’s results. Check out Cedato’s demo to see intent-based advertising in action.