Not Just ‘Skip It’, ‘Kill It’ – Scotts’ Creative Work to Compete with an Anti-Preroll Behavior
Have you experienced any Pre-roll ads before? If I asked this question, some of you might wonder what did I mean by ‘Pre-roll’ and what should I answer. However, if I change it to ‘Have you experienced any annoying video commercials that annoyingly show up so often before your destination without your permission whenever you click on some Youtube clips to watch and enjoy’, it may be easier for you guys to think of any outstanding Pre-roll ads that stick to your head, positively and negatively!
According to the definition in Netlingo.com, ‘Pre-roll’is the name of an online video commercial that appears prior to an online video, and it is typically :10 – :15 seconds in length. Once you click on certain online video links, you will be forced to watch a short commercial before the video content, and that commercial is called ‘Pre-roll.’
Pre-roll is growing more popular due to the fact that online publishers can pretty much guarantee that users will see and hear the pre-roll commercial before the audio stream starts. Pre-roll also faces a problem of rejection from consumers as they are forced to watch and it may result negatively and makes people refuse to accept the brands as well. A recent study by online video analytics firm TubeMogul showed that the 30-second pre-roll causes nearly 16% — or one in six — of every viewer to tune away. In spite of that, Pre-roll are still working well in terms of invest and advertising and many attempts trying to fight with ‘Anti-preroll’ behavior by using creativity and ideas could be seen more and more nowadays.
Finding it could be useful for future advertisers like you guys, I would like to introduce one creative Pre-roll ad that creatively interacted with users and strongly delivered its messages to customers. This pre-roll is an online commercial for the product Weed B Gon from Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, Canada, handled by a well-known Canadian agency, Rethink. Basically, this ad comes up with puppets Prickly that yell at you, curse you, annoyingly bite your feet, and do other annoying stuffs that make you want to kill them, and that’s exactly what the ad wants from you – “they want you to want him dead!”
One of its specialties is that it let you, viewers or users, choose whether you want to just skip them or KILL them right away by clicking the red box with text ‘Kill Prickly’ that shows up right above the normal ‘Skip Ad’ button. If you choose to kill the Prickly by clicking the red box, it will skip to the part of the video where you get to see exactly what Weed B Gon does to him – KILL! (by spraying them with Weed B Gon, foo foo~ )
Here are the ad video that you can see how it works, however the skip button won’t appear here, since this video embed is not acting as a preroll. Try clicking the ‘Kill Prickly’ button!
This campaign is simple, yet interesting, as well as successful in delivering its message of how the products work – spray pricklies with Weed B Gon, let them meet their demise, and get your lawn better off.
The company tied the annoying feeling of getting invaded by Prickly in customers’ gardens to the desire for consumers to get rid of annoying ads as soon as possible and it works pretty well, especially for grabbing people’s attention with its creativity.
This is one of the attempts trying to survive from being just another ‘annoying, skippable’ Pre-roll ad and the anti-preroll behavior by using creativity to interact with and send message to customers. I am sure there are and surely will be many more creative pre-roll ads that are successful from making people remember and not refuse to accept them. If you can think any Pre-roll ads that their creativity or techniques got your attention and made you watch them until the end without skipping, feel free to let me know in the comments section below. Enjoy!
Sources:
5월 1, 2016, Interactive Advertising PR에 게시되었습니다. 퍼머링크를 북마크하세요. 댓글 2개.
Ewha [Brand Communication] 
Haha, this is hilarious. Since I’s always using an Ad Blocker, I don’t have to worry about coming across preroll advertisings.
But if I had seen this ad, I definitely would have chosen “Kill Prickly”, too. This is such a great way to promote the product in an entertaining and interactive way. Makes me wonder why no one else had this idea before. Thank you for sharing!
좋아요좋아요
Thank you for posting this! I also think this is a very clever and fun way to advertise your product on a platform – pre-roll – that is basically doomed to be skipped and ignored by most users. Me and most people I know, however, use an ad blocking app of some sort which doesn’t even play those first few seconds of a pre-roll. I am often wondering if the increasing use of ad blockers will make pre-rolls obsolete in the near future.
좋아요좋아요