Solve Media Solves Pre-Roll Video Ad 'Zone Out' Problem?

Captcha for pre-roll video ads? That's essentially the deal with Solve Media's solution to viewers zoning out of pre-roll ads. It could work I suppose, remember that study that said people who watch time-shifted stuff had better brand recall essentially because they paid more attention when fast-forwarding through the ads, well, this could work the same way.

Their new tech is called Type-IN and has both display and pre-roll versions. Instead of the standard click to skip, thereby allowing the viewer to mostly zone out the pre-roll, instead they have to type in some text associated with the brand. Now, when I was in school I always wrote down the important stuff because I felt that it fixed it in my brain better and with some new research in neuroscience that may in fact be the case (see this month's Wired).

SEE ALSO: An Example of a Perfectly Executed Pre-Roll Video Ad

Social Media is offering what they call Pre-roll Insurance (anything with the word insurance in it sounds like a scam to me, but that's just me).

Here's what the Solve Media site says about it:

You can buy Pre-Roll TYPE-IN™ Ads from Solve Media or use Pre-Roll Insurance (patent pending) anywhere you already buy video ads. Adding Pre-Roll Insurance to your media plan gives your audience two choices: watch your message, or type it in. Eliminate skipping, multitasking and tuning-out. Stop wasting valuable opportunities to reach your audience, and make your Pre-Roll creative outperform with any publisher. Pre-Roll Insurance guarantees that you always make an impression and achieves the highest brand recall of any form of advertising.

• Achieve unparalleled brand recall - even when users choose to skip
• Guarantee an attentive audience across any media plan
• Engender goodwill by offering user choice
• Receive additional reporting beyond traditional video metrics
• Use any ad server, network or video exchange

When you buy Pre-Roll Insurance, your creative will replace the publisher's skip button. Our platform handles all of the heavy lifting, making trafficking the same as any other video ad. But now it's much more valuable.

How's that all work?

They've got a cool little diagram and some of you are most likely visual learners, so here you go.

Some Technical Mumbo-Jumbo

I was curious about how it might get implemented and dug about on their site. It seems they've got some pre-made integration for popular web software like phpBB, disqus, WordPress, Drupal, Wiki, Joomla and vBulletin. They've also got APIs for many standard programming languages like perl, php, asp, python and asp.net.

Does it work?

Well, if you believe everything you read, then the answer is yes. If you're more skeptical like I am then the answer is, "Hmmmm could be." That's just me being me though, not saying their tech and research are bad. Here's a graph where they talk about the brand recall uplift, so it's got to have some positive impact.

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• Native Video Ads Outperform Pre-Roll Ads [Study]

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