Definition

Video advertisements that play before desired content, testing viewer patience since the dawn of online video. The digital descendant of unskippable movie theater ads, except you're in your underwear.

Example Usage

Our pre-roll ad has a 23% completion rate, meaning three-quarters of viewers would rather navigate away than endure 15 seconds of our brilliance.

Origin

Online video advertising terminology from the mid-2000s with the rise of YouTube and video streaming

Fun Fact

Pre-roll ads have higher completion rates than mid-roll but lower than post-roll, because by then viewers are emotionally invested in their content.

Source: Video advertising standards and IAB Digital Video Guidelines

Related Terms

Beginner

influencer marketing

Paying people with large social media followings to promote your product, operating on the principle that strangers trust other strangers more than they trust brands. It's word-of-mouth marketing for the selfie generation.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Beginner

FOMO

Fear Of Missing Out, the primal anxiety that everyone else is having more fun, getting better deals, or attending cooler events than you. Marketers exploit this emotion like a villain in a Disney movie, using countdown timers and "only 2 left" warnings.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Beginner

Reach

The total number of unique people who saw your content, which sounds impressive until you realize most of them were scrolling past it at the speed of light. Reach is the vanity metric that other vanity metrics aspire to be when they grow up.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

Market Fit

The magical moment when your product actually solves a problem people are willing to pay for, which happens far less often than startup founders would have you believe. Finding product-market fit is like finding a parking spot downtown: everyone says they have a strategy, but mostly it's just luck.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

contextual advertising

Placing ads based on the content of the page rather than user tracking, showing car ads on automotive sites instead of following users around. It's the old-fashioned targeting approach that's suddenly new again as privacy regulations tighten.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Advanced

cohort analysis

A method of grouping customers by shared characteristics or behaviors within a specific timeframe to track patterns over time. It's essentially marketing's way of figuring out which batch of customers is actually worth keeping around.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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See “pre-roll ad” in Corporate Speak, Gen-Z Slang, Pirate Speak, and more.

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