- Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Yahoo! has added new options for advertisers interested in moving beyond repurposing their TV commercials for online video.
 
While the company plans to still sell pre-roll ads, which are the dominant form of video advertising, it now offers formats that it believes are either less intrusive or more interactive for viewers.
 
Yahoo! has introduced two formats. The "Interactive" unit plays a three-second commercial snippet before the message retreats to a banner ad that sits atop a video player. Users can click on the banner, which pauses the video and brings up a microsite in the player window. If viewers do not engage with the unit, they are shown a post-roll spot. The "Clickable" format gives advertisers the ability to spice up run-of-the-mill TV commercials with clickable text links within the video.
 
Early advertisers testing the formats since November include Adobe, Esurance, HBO and Sharp. According to Yahoo!, the Clickable video ads got click rates as high as 8 percent and Interactive placements drew around 4 percent. Both numbers dwarf typical click-through rates on banners, which are well below 1 percent.
 
As part of a $160 million deal to acquire Maven Networks, Yahoo! can now offer Flash overlay ads, the format popularized by ad network VideoEgg and adopted by Google for YouTube. It plans to offer the overlay unit by the third quarter.
 
Previously, advertisers on Yahoo! could only run standard 15- and 30-second pre-roll spots. Like pre-rolls, the new formats will be sold on a CPM basis, though Yahoo! is doing CPC deals for some Clickable placements.
 
"We all want the best experience for users, but the problem is there's a multi-billion advertising industry built around television creative," said Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy at Yahoo!. "Evolution is happening much slower than any of us would like."
 
The efforts come as advertisers explore formats better suited for the online video experience, which typically involves short clips. Google has declined to run pre-roll placements on YouTube, far and away the most popular video destination online. Hulu, the News Corp. and NBC online video venture, is also not running pre-roll ads in favor of placing spots between content segments. Heavy and DailyMotion are running video player skins.
 
The many new formats put pressure on the industry to set common standards, Paoletti said.
 
"We make it hard for advertisers," she said. "We need to focus on more open standards.

"The overlays are the evolution of what we're going to see between pure push experience, which is the pre roll, and the opt-in experience," said Eric Druckenmiller, vp of media at Deep Focus, which ran an Interactive campaign to promote HBO's In Treatment series.