It’s football (soccer) World Cup season! Most people I know seem to be enjoying the games (lamenting the vuvuzelas as well – now there’s a scrabble word for you!) and they are receiving a lot of quality coverage from ESPN/ABC.

The online coverage on ESPN3 (full matches) and on ESPNsoccernet (which Buena Vista Internet Group, part of Disney, acquired a majority stake in back in 1999) has been good as well. I went to catch up on some scores today, however, and noticed something that encouraged me to write about a larger phenomenon that still befuddles me, namely that of how video pre-roll advertising is bought and sold.

The World Cup page has results for all the games played today – there were four games – arranged via tabs on the top of the screen. When clicking on the tabs which contain the results of the games, you are taken to a page underneath each tab that has a report of the game on the left and a video of the highlights on the right. The highlights video has a 15-second pre-roll ad, followed by a 7 second “this expert analysis is brought to you by” sponsor section featuring the same advertiser, however, before you can watch the game highlights (40-50 seconds). Here’s a screenshot of the unit:

Ok. so I don’t have a problem with paying the freight for the highlights, happy to check out the ad for “Knight and Day”, the new Tom Cruise movie. Even thought the soccer ball juggling thing was cute (that’s on the site you click through to, not in the ad itself). But here’s what I have a problem with – seeing the ad, again, and again, and again.

The same ad was shown to me every time, every time I clicked on a different game result – before I could see highlights I had to watch the ad again. I understand that this was a sponsorship deal and the advertiser paid a lot of money for it and wanted to get their money’s worth, but really — showing the same loud, interruptive video preroll ad multiple times is unlikely to curry favor with fans trying to quickly catch up on the highlights. Show it once then perhaps show something else, or skip the ad in favor of a little thing saying “brought to you by” (no we have to sit through the sponsor message AND the trailer ad both, every time).

Guys, we have frequency caps on ads for a reason. You can even do things like show me the ad, then not show me the same ad for 20 minutes (or whatever). But it doesn’t seem like you care…

A few things here – 1) there isn’t enough on-site inventory for these big media buys and so publishers are looking for more inventory and so have to replace almost everything they can with a single advertiser’s creatives, but 2) Video and creative assets cost money and as we’ve seen, online audience-based advertising has underinvestment in creative resources and so inevitably the same, small number of ads are reused again and again (I saw the trailer on their website – it was 2.22 minutes long…. there are quite a few ways you can cut different 15 second slots out of it – but that would be expensive and effortful). Aside from video you could even do different things with various static messages too. 3) It’s hard to know what the impact of the annoyance factor is — especially considering that I might go see this movie anyway, the ROI on these campaigns let alone assessing what “waste” there might or might not be doing things this way could be hard to fathom. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and I really think there is true upside to just knowing in general whether this thing is a good idea.

I’d suggest publishers and big advertisers (and their agencies) give a little forethought to the user experience when designing some of these types of campaigns – I’ve seen lots of other examples of too few creative assets chasing a small number of users who end up getting deluged with the same video ads again and again. Companies in the ad industry though, should be working together to come up with the proof points on whether these are good or bad ideas and to what extent – I’d respect (not like) it if they could show me the research that pointed to this working for them, but my hunch is that they’re not doing it for that reason.

Update: Jumped into the half-time show on ESPN3 during the Italy game on 6/24 and saw the same “Knight and Day” ad twice (movie opened 6/23) in the first pod of the half-time show, one after another, then saw the same two again, one after the other in the second ad pod towards the end. Really, is this intentional – does the advertiser want this?