My garbage disposal started making a sound on Sunday, so I did what everyone does and looked for a video about it. Before a man in an Ohio basement could show me the gasket, I got eleven seconds of a crossover SUV.
I did not watch eleven seconds of it. I watched five, because five is what the platform actually sells, and then I hit skip with the particular irritation of a person standing in a wet kitchen holding a flashlight.
That fifth second is the entire product. Everything after it is a rounding error made of people who forgot where the mouse was.
We keep calling this a medium. It is not a medium. A medium is a place the audience has agreed to be. Pre-roll is a toll booth installed in front of something the audience actually came for, and the money you spend on it is not buying attention. It is buying the right to delay somebody.
You are not renting an audience, you are borrowing against goodwill that belongs to somebody else's content, and the interest gets charged to your brand.
Which is fine, occasionally, as long as you build for a toll booth instead of pretending you built a theater. Three things follow from that.
One, the first five seconds are not a runway. They are the ad. Say the name, land the one idea, earn the sixth second or accept that you will never see it. Two, stop cutting down the thirty second television spot. That spot was built on a contract where the viewer sits still, and no such contract exists here. Three, budget for the resentment. If you buy fifty million impressions, price in the people who now associate your brand with a delay between them and a gasket.
The pre-roll I have liked this year shares one quality, which is that it admits the skip button exists. Geico did it a few years back by finishing the joke before the skip was even legal. Others do it by simply being short. Six seconds is a small request, and small requests get granted.
What separates that work from the rest is not craft. It is honesty about the transaction. The brands that annoy me are the ones still behaving as though I chose them, when both of us know I did not, and the pretending is what makes it insulting rather than dull.
Pre-roll is a toll booth installed in front of something the audience actually came for, and the money you spend on it is not buying attention.
Karaoke on Thursday, sticky floor, the host who calls everybody baby. You get about eight seconds after the first line before the room decides whether to look up. I have never once earned the ninth on vocal quality. I earn it by committing immediately, which is, unfortunately, also the entire brief for pre-roll.