| Online advertising has rapidly become a major source of revenue for websites. Accordingly, video advertising, among various online advertising media, is gaining dominance. In May 2006, the IAB Broadband Committee (now the Digital Video Committee) defined a video ad as a commercial that may appear before, during, or after a variety of content including streaming video, animation, gaming, and music video content in a player environment. Pre-roll ad is a linear video spot that appears before the video content plays, such as the ads mandatorily play before video content in domestic video site Youku. According to psychological reactance theory, pre-roll ad which can’t be skipped deprive users’ rights to choose whether to see it or not, so users will be triggered resistance in their mind, and eventually transfer to other places to regain freedom. Currently before each video content, the number of pre-roll ads is gradually increasing, so as the length of pre-roll ads. Although online video advertising is currently a pervasive medium, its effectiveness is still in great doubt. Therefore, the effectiveness of pre-roll ads becomes a topic for both advertisers and researchers.Based on the literature review of advertising effectiveness, there are still few studies focus on how advertising features enhance advertising effectiveness.In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of pre-roll ads from the perspective of interactivity including user control and two-way communication. This study adopts laboratory experiments to test research hypothesises. Firstly, we design a video website with function of user control and two-way communication. Secondly, I compare the users who watch the user control pre-roll ad with the users who watch the mandatory pre-roll ad. And the same operation will be carried on two-way communication. The results show that the pre-roll ad with user control can effectively promote users’ad recall, attitude toward advertising, brand and website. And the pre-roll ad with two-way communication can promote users’ attitude toward advertising and website, but the ad recall and attitude towards brand have not been verified. I hope that through this study, on the one hand I can make theoretical contributions to the study on effectiveness of pre-roll ads; on the other hand, I hope to provide a theoretical support and guide the direction for advertisers to improve user experience of pre-roll ads. |
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