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Venture Stream Blog

The video advertising industry say it’s not.

July 1, 2014

Is two seconds enough time for anything? For decades we have been asking people to wait patiently for “just two seconds” I’ll literally be “two seconds” it will only take “two seconds”. However, members of the video advertising industry have been left disgruntled after hearing their ad impressions are going to count (and be charged for) after this brief period of time.

“It’s way too short… We want to set the metric, but does the starting point have to be so low?”

Quote from Ad Week Article by Kevin Scholl, digital marketing manager at Red Roof Inn
After some discussion here at Venture Stream, we feel it does. If you don’t want to engage with the advertisement this should be long enough for you to make up your mind – and you have to actively engage with it to dismiss it. More so, there are thousands of online ads out there that are paying per impression which are seldom seen or noticed; buried way down into worlds unknown to visitors (or right at the bottom of the webpage).

Two seconds. What if we used this as a method of payment? If your ad is appealing and the viewer chooses to engage with it, you pay for a 30 second slot. If its dismissed after two seconds, or five or ten, you pay a percentage of your total impression cost. Simple.

This could also help to improve the quality of video adverts as well as move us into a new era of advertising. You could then use the length or cost spent on an advert to judge its KPI. Video ads would be come smarter too; almost like a carefully crafted tabloid article – where the viewer or reader gets everything they need to know in the first paragraph.

Web users are speeding up and wising up, and our attention spans and patience when waiting for content is getting shorter. We want the information quick, fast and right now – not in minutes.

We either get more engaging or we’re going to need Bernard’s watch.