Pre-Roll Advertising, YouTube, Digital

Design4’s recent digital campaign for its affiliate partner, Front Line Strategies who is managing FL Rep. Dennis Baxley’s campaign, including pre-roll video and display banner ads.

A compelling message is the heart of any good campaign. But an effective campaign will learn to adapt that message across the wide variety of media today in order to reach audiences most favorable to it. So while the number of views your message receives is still important, having interested viewers is even more so.

Enter the realm of data-driven opportunity. With voter file data now available for use in digital targeting, political and advocacy campaigns can micro-target key audiences online to better promote a piece of legislation, a ballot proposition, or social cause. The advantage to you: monitoring and immediacy. You can watch your results in real-time then modify your message immediately to better capture viewer interest and response. Technology helps your creative message work harder, a game changer for those who know how to apply effective messaging with these new technological tool.

We recently ran a three-week campaign to generate name awareness for a political candidate using both Targeted Display Advertising (TDA) and Pre-Roll Advertising (PRA) targeting voters in a very cost-effective outreach to tightly defined markets.

What is Pre-Roll Advertising? It is traditional messaging:

  • Adapted to serve in-stream video to viewers before premium content on leading publisher sites;
  • Ideal for shorter videos of :15 and :30 
duration;
  • Most effective with companion banner ads to deliver an immersive ad experience across the page

If you think people just skip those ads, think again. We targeted the viewers using voter registration data as well as by age and geography and 83% of those who viewed the :15 pre-roll and 70% of those viewing the :30 pre-roll watched it all the way through! The campaign reached our target viewership an average of 3.2 times over a 2-week period.

The messages worked because they were crafted specifically to attract and retain the viewer’s attention in the :15 and :30 second format. Working with Front Line Strategies, Design4’s affiliate partner who is managing the legislator’s campaign, we  used the same message as the campaign’s :30 ads, but wrote and delivered key message points differently.

Read more about pre-roll video here (download the file and open it in Adobe Acrobat to view the interactive PDF).  Look for information on display advertising next week, another form of digital advertising you can now use to target those on your own mailing lists.