Barrett Garese

Ad Age asks: What if preroll could do more?

Today’s Advertising Age asks a simple question:

What if your preroll video ads were more than just repurposed-for-the-web-TV spots, the kind agencies have in spades? What if pre-roll could do more?

The answer is simple. It’s already underway at blip, as Ad Age reports:

A group of developers at start-up blip.tv, a purveyor of amateur and semi-pro Web series, was wondering that recently… pondering the best way to help Wieden & Kennedy let gamers see — or better yet, play — a demo of its client Electronic Arts’ NCAA Football 11… Engineers set to work on the problem and developed a unit that allows users to click-to-download a game demo to XBOX consoles.

Yup. We built that. The ad runs against very specific audiences who own xbox 360s. It offers them the ability to download a demo of the game and play it on their own xbox 360. It’s the first time anything like this has ever been done in an ad unit before. It should be obvious, but we’ll say it anyway: gamers who play a demo are much more likely to ultimately buy the game… As Michael Diccicco from W&K says: “With video games in general the best way to sell it is to get the consumers’ hands on it. We’re asking them to spend $60 so it helps if you can get them some play time on it.”

This is all part of something that we believe is fundamental to blip.tv. We exist to solve problems for our stakeholders. We exist to create value. If Electronic Arts wants to sell more copies of NCAA11 it’s our job to help them do that. That’s what advertising is for… it’s why people buy advertising. Similarly if a show producer wants to get more viewership and advertising revenue it’s our job to do help them do that.

As Ad Age says:

New York-based Blip.tv takes no ownership interest in the shows it represents and doesn’t sign any of them to exclusive contracts. It is, essentially, an engineering company and a sales force that builds tools for show creators, and more recently, advertisers. Eleven of its 32 people on staff are programmers or developers. It raised $10.1 million in June and racks up about 100 million views on its collection of shows each month. Blip.tv’s top earners pull down $500,000 in ad revenue a year based on 50/50 revenue sharing.

Bingo. We’re here to solve problems for show producers and marketers. That’s what we do. We help marketers move product off of store shelves (real or virtual) and we help shows become sustainable. And we build whatever we have to, whatever we need to, to make that happen.

So tell us what you need to be successful. How we can help make your show more sustainable, how we can solve problems for you, how we can sell more of your product. How we can actually create value. We’d like to help.