Geico’s new pre-roll video campaign is based on a pretty basic insight of online video: we all skip the ads.
So, the new campaign delivers the ad’s message in its entirety within the first 5 seconds, before a viewer has the option to skip. Within those 5 seconds, the dialog ends and the remainder of the video shows a funny “paused” scene that users would actually want to continue watching, just to see what happens next. While it requires additional budgets to allocate separate funds to TV and online video, it’s crucial for advertisers to remember where and how a user will be receiving an ad when developing strategies. Geico provides an example that you cannot treat TV and pre-roll the same way if you want to leverage those first 5 seconds successfully.