New Un-Roll video ad format: Is it the holy grail of short-form video advertising?

It seems like every week someone comes out with a new format or a new ad unit for video ads.  Recently Blinkx announced a placement called the Un-Roll, which is meant to allow advertisers to engage with video viewers in a less disruptive way.  The Un-Roll isn't anything dramatically new, but rather a compilation of a few different tactics that have been seen in online advertising many times before.  Basically it's a 2-second splash screen, followed by a 20-second overlay at the bottom of the video window as the clip is playing, with a clickable call to action placed below the video for the entire clip.  Here's a demo of the Un-Roll on Blinkx's site.

The Un-Roll -- just like overlay ads in YouTube and several different formats developed by VideoEgg (and a number of others) -- are the industry's attempt to monetize shorter web videos.  But no matter whether you're using an overlay, a branded video player, a pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, etc., it's still all about relevance.

When you watch the Un-Roll demo, this new ad format seems to make sense because the advertiser is Shell and the video is contextually relevant to the sponsor.  But I'm sure the moment the Shell ad appears on a video about something that isn't related to driving or fuel, the response rate will plummet.  Nearly any type of video ad format can get good results when the ad is matched up with a relevant video content!

Right now you have brand advertisers like Shell that want to spend money on video advertising, but they struggle to find the right audience.  Shell's ads perform best in contextually-relevant context, like the Un-Roll example about finding better fuel economy, so it's a no-brainer for Shell to place ads against those types of videos.  But Shell's problem is that it needs to reach a mass market, and only a tiny fraction of its target audience will be watching videos about fuel economy.

How does Shell reach the viewers who are only watching a 23-second clip of a kid falling off his skateboard?  You might say Shell can try advertising against user-generated videos on YouTube, but the click-through performance is going to be poor and the audience annoyance factor will be high.

I don't see an easy answer to this big challenge the online video industry faces.  It doesn't matter what kind of brilliant ad format you develop.  When the ad isn't relevant to the viewer, it's still interruption marketing, and the response rate decreases.  (Does that mean the ad is completely ineffective?  Of course not.  You still have branding benefits, but that's a separate topic for a different day.)  But a slick new ad format won't magically make ads placed within "kid-falling-off-skateboard" clips more effective.

Photo by I Love Trees