In the past few days, both TechCrunch and the WSJ have reported about how both YouTube and VideoEgg are trying new ad formats. YouTube is rumoured to have finally capitulated to pressure and run a pre-roll. VideoEgg announced a raft of new formats. Saying I told you so is fairly pompous, bombastic and sophomoric, but I’m in that mood at the moment. Readers of these pages have heard us repeatedly state that the ad formats are not the issue. You need to find the right environment which consists of three things, the content, the user and the ad; and it’s the mix of all three that will determine the success or failure of an ad campaign. And to put a finer point on it, the ad could vary from user to user and from content-to-content. Yes, carried to the extreme, it’ll cause mass confusion and may have scalability problems, but as the market fragments and user’s can choose whatever they want, we’ll all just have to deal with that problem.

A few specific comments on the VideoEgg announcement along the lines of “I told you so” is that we’ve been running their LIVE, RICH and LOCAL ads for over a year now. Wonder when they’ll start running pre-rolls?

- Jayant Kadambi