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The advertising viewer experience is about to get better.
Today, ad-tech platform FreeWheel, along with audience research firm MediaScience, released new findings from the Viewer Experience Lab initiative, with the latest report revealing how publishers can optimize ad breaks to create more brand impact and better viewer sentiment.
“With so much choice for consumers on how and where they engage with content, it’s more important than ever that platforms prioritize the viewer,” Mark McKee, general manager of FreeWheel, said in a statement. “This research provides practical considerations for publishers to make the ad experience better and limit subscription churn, while giving brands the best environment to connect with viewers.”
The new Viewer Experience Lab report, Designing a Better Ad Pod, explores the quantity and cadence of ads in a pod, ultimately creating recommendations for three factors: pod length, architecture and frequency.
“A lot of research was done. Our goal was, ‘How do we make the research usable?'” McKee told Adweek. “So we took boatloads of data and turned it into three key insights that will be the start of our foundation.”
In the study, 700 viewers participated in at-home or in-lab viewing environments and were shown programming with varied ad pod lengths, ad durations and frequency. In addition to being surveyed in real time, the FreeWheel Viewer Experience Lab and MediaScience analyzed responses.
For pod length, the report found ad breaks of 2 minutes or less improved brand impact and ad experience.
According to McKee, 2-minute ad pods were the “sweet spot,” allowing brands to have relevancy to consumers, balance the value exchange and still not feel disruptive to the overall viewer experience.
“Above 2 minutes, you saw a pretty significant decline in things like recall and that intrusive nature,” McKee said. “You’re a consumer. You feel it. You might not know how long the ad break was, but you start to feel it.”
Regarding ad pod construction or architecture, consistency came out on top.
According to the report, consistent ad lengths within individual pods can improve ad sentiment and make breaks feel shorter for consumers.
“My headline for that would be expectation,” McKee said. “What are consumers expecting? The number of ads has a huge implication for the brands and the clutter of an ad experience.”
Finally, the research looked at the frequency of pods within a program, finding that two or three per 30-minute program can positively impact ad recognition and brand purchase intent.
“We identified that a frequency of two within a program yielded a balance of recall,” McKee said. “Plus, this concept of favorability, which is being less intrusive.”
Just the start
The report comes around six months after FreeWheel first announced its Viewer Experience Lab and partnership with MediaScience at Cannes Lions 2023.
McKee stressed that the initial findings are just the foundation and the research will get more granular from here, exploring things such as the brand side of ad recall, digging into the environment in which ads are placed, and providing a better understanding of the construction of pods as brands and marketers navigate the changing streaming and connected TV advertising landscape.
“Any one publisher we have on FreeWheel has 400+ endpoints in which that same content can be consumed,” McKee said. “They’re not all the same. So how do you manage against that?”
McKee explained that marketers shouldn’t take the research as a “red flag” or a notice that “everything they’ve been doing is wrong.” But brands should think about how content is running, where it’s being consumed and the level of video-buying transparency that goes along with it, holding streamers to the same standards that TV publishers have had for years.
“What buyers expect of TV, they should expect from everybody else,” McKee said.
