I’ve had a keen eye for marketing as long as I can remember. As a child, I reached for the Want Ads before the comics and always paid far more attention to commercials than the programming they were embedded in. After three and a half decades of watching, it drives me crazy when I see big name advertisers consistently misusing a marketing form. I’ve found that to be especially true in video content.
Everybody, large and small, has seen the little commercials that YouTube forces you to watch before you can click through to get to your video of dancing cats. They’re the little annoyances that we all wait impatiently through, until the “Skip Ad” button pops up. According to a TubeMogul report in 2013, up to 85 percent of all those ads are skipped with glee.