Rethinking Ad Formats for OTT and News
Audiences raised on streaming will not sit through advertising designed for broadcast. Publishers moving to OTT need a different approach.
News organisations have moved onto streaming platforms in large numbers, and many carried their broadcast advertising conventions across unchanged.
That transfer does not hold up. A viewer who deliberately chose a ninety-second clip from a menu has different expectations from one who left a channel running in the background, and their tolerance for a thirty-second pre-roll is close to zero.
Why the old format fails here
Broadcast advertising worked partly because leaving was inconvenient. On demand, leaving costs one tap. Any format whose economics depend on the viewer being unable to escape will underperform the moment escaping is easy.
What tends to survive
- Shorter units. Length that was reasonable before a thirty-minute programme is not reasonable before a two-minute one.
- Proportionate placement. Match ad load to content length rather than applying a fixed pre-roll to everything.
- Real breaks. Insert at a natural segment boundary, not at an arbitrary timestamp.
- Contextual relevance. Matching the ad to what the clip is actually about beats matching it to a page-level category.
The prerequisite
Most of these depend on knowing what is inside the video — where segments begin and end, what each one covers, where the natural breaks fall. Without that, every placement decision falls back to a fixed rule, and fixed rules are what produced the problem.