Well, the venerable Ad Age recently wrote an article commenting on a study by Jupiter that pre-rolls actually don’t hurt customers. Not to pick on Ad Age, (OK, I will), but what seems prima facie to be a reasonable article that pre-rolls really do work, and customers are not driven away and the sky won’t cave in and bludgeon your website to death because you had the audacity to run a pre-roll which many, including this magazine, some ad networks, Google/Youtube and others have simply railed against seems like a 100% about face to me.

After spending the last year pontificating and letting others pontificate about the horrid pre-roll and in-stream ads interrupting viewers and the like, when all the evidence points against it, (at least in premium content), at best didn’t help the situation, and at worst added to the confusion in the video ad marketplace.

To be positive about it, it’s great to see “research” point to what we have written on these pages as being obvious. Publishers should be able to monetise their video using whatever ad inventory or ad type suites their content. Advertisers should be able to use existing creative assets and run them on publishers and networks that can figure out what will work where, when and how. Maybe we can now all get to work running ads instead of arguing about pre-rolls.

- Jayant Kadambi