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The problem with pre-roll advertisements: now is not the time

April 18th, 2007 by Bryan

Update (4-18-07, 9 p.m.): Another example is in this AP video of the newly released “multimedia manifesto” by the VT killer, which features a 15-second Microsoft ad. Sorry, MS - now is not the time, this is not the video for pre-roll ads.

Yahoo! News has video from the Virginia Tech shootings, including this video of a cell phone capturing audio of gun shots being fired. But you know what you have to get through to get to the video? @$#%@ 30 seconds of an M&Ms video! This is the problem with pre-roll commercials - they are inappropriate at the beginning of some stories - including any stories involving the deaths of human beings. This isn’t the only pre-roll I’ve had to sit through today that irked me.

I understand that Internet video costs money, and advertising pays the bills, but there are times when advertising should be kept out of the equation. This is one of those times.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Va. Tech Shooting, Academics, General Media, Multimedia views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “The problem with pre-roll advertisements: now is not the time”

  1. Kate Zimmermann Says:
    April 17th, 2007 at 8:52 am

    CNN had the same problem with their contextual search and banner ads running alongside the developing story:

    http://searchviews.com/archives/2007/04/virginia_tech_shootings.php

    If anything, it reinforces the need for human editors in contextually-placed advertising.

  2. Chip Griffin: Pardon the Disruption Says:
    May 10th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

    Profiting from Breaking News and Tragedy?…

    A grad student doing some research emailed me today to ask what I thought about media web sites including pre-roll advertising on breaking news video. The impetus was apparently an ad that a news site showed as a pre-roll before…

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