I shared a link with my wife for a video on a major television network site last week. She clicked on the link and said “This isn’t very interesting. Why did you send this to me?” It was a pre-roll ad, before the video I had intended her to view. My wife’s response is fairly typical of how most Americans view pre-roll and overlay ads. It all gets lumped into the “This isn’t what I clicked on to see” category.

According to analysis from eMarketer provided by video ad network YuMe, between Q1 and Q4 of 2009, click-through rates dropped steadily from 1.88% to 0.74%. Completion rates dropped as well, from 77.4% to 66.3%  by the year end.

TubeMogul Research Reports recently completed a study where they looked at nearly 1.8 million videos varying in length from 3-10 minutes and distributed from top television broadcasters, magazines and newspapers. The results were shocking:

• Overall, 15.89% of viewers click away from a video rather than sit through a pre-roll ad.
• 24.85% of viewers click away on top magazine and newspaper sites.

So if I am a magazine or newspaper publisher I’m looking at these numbers and thinking “So pre-roll ads are a revenue stream but I am losing nearly 25% of the audience who was coming to my site to view OUR content because of them.” It’s sort of a Catch 22…but is it really?

I wrote about this in an blog post titled Stop Trying to Force Monetization of Online Video over a year ago when the statistics were already starting to plummet for pre-roll and especially post-roll overlay video ads. I still believe the only occasion where pre-roll ads or post-roll ads could be seamlessly built in around the content is with long-form (online television shows or movies) not every 90 second news story on their sites.

I believe we are in a scenario not that different from when television was in it’s infancy and they tried to apply “what worked” for radio broadcasting to television advertising. It failed. The same way pre-roll and post-roll ads applied to online video content are trying to mimic television commercials and are having predictably abysmal returns.

People have a shorter attention span online than they do anywhere else. You’ve got less than 5 seconds. If the content they clicked to see wasn’t there, they are long gone.

In today’s online world if you really want to get people to view your video content – don’t slap it over another publishers video content…create your own story with a call-to-action built in. Besides if you create content geared and tagged to get found by your demographic, it’s that much more targeted to reach your audience when and where they are searching. Couple that with the fact that audiences are not loyal to any specific publishers online where you would typically pay to run overlay ads…is running pre-roll really worth it?

One of the biggest problems of marketing videos and animations for B2B is many business people don’t have audio turned on in their offices. It’s just impractical for some or obtrusive for others particularly in a company with large areas of open cubicles. Suddenly the CEO’s talking head in your video or a voice-over describing how your service works isn’t heard or conveyed as effectively as possible to your viewer.

So what do you do as a B2B marketer when creating an online marketing video about your product or service? Here are a couple of very simple solutions.

Add Subtitles

In a report published by eMarketer with research done by PLYmedia they found on average that subtitles increased the length of video viewer engagement by almost 40%. Another interesting stat was:

“Comparing subtitled videos to identical videos without subtitles, PLYmedia found that the videos with subtitles were watched 91% to completion, compared with 66% to completion for those without subtitles.”

Even more significant was that subtitles increased viewership of videos on “mute,” by 20x.

This all clearly shows that adding closed captioning or subtitles to your product demo or marketing video will greatly increase the efficiency of your your video when primarily selling it to business people.

Make audio a “bonus feature”

Not literally, but as part of the scripting process for your videos think of the visuals that will be involved so they tell the story for you. This is so simple to do but something that so many people fail to take into account when producing a marketing video. Animation is exceptional at taking concepts or hard to describe features and conceptually bringing them to life for the viewer through visual communication.

Another reason visually scripting your video is a best practice is that the language you produce the video in,  may not be the first language of your viewer or your target demographic. So while having a slick talking voice over may sound fantastic, it may be difficult for a non-native speaker to follow.

Utilizing a visual scriptwriting process for your animation not only reinforces points to your native speaking audience but also communicates your information to your non-native speaking audience. The bonus is this method also delivers your message effectively to your audience who don’t have their audio turned on or are forced to watch it in “mute mode”.

So what about you? What are you doing to make sure your message is communicated as effectively as possible?