Abstract
Newspapers have reported instances of famous brands' ads running as pre-rolls to terrorist videos on YouTube. Subsequent brand safety fears have led to advertisers pulling their YouTube ads. This study, a lab experiment, tested the effects of program quality and content—particularly violent, sexual or extremist content—on pre-roll ads. The experiment used measures from studies showing significant broadcast TV content effects on mid-roll advertising, using more extreme cable TV content to increase the chances of finding significant effects on pre-roll ads. Overall, the effects were minimal, with no effects on brand attitudes, ad liking, or three ad memory components—encoding, storage, and retrieval. In contrast to research showing program context effects on mid-roll advertising, context effects (e.g., on brand safety) do not seem an issue for pre-roll ads. A brand's reputation might suffer negative effects from pre-roll advertising in other ways, however. A limitation is that this study did not re-test the effects of controversial content on mid-roll advertising.
Highlights
Industry and academia have long suspected that undesirable ad contexts reduce the positive effects of ads and harm brand reputation
Video content effects were examined with a 4 Â 2 Â 2 (Content [neutral, violence, sex, extremist] Â Budget [low, high] Â Group [1, 2]) analysis of variance (ANOVA)
This study suggests brand safety is not an issue for pre-roll ad effectiveness
Summary
Industry and academia have long suspected that undesirable ad contexts reduce the positive effects of ads and harm brand reputation. Ads for famous brands, and US government departments (e.g., Department of Transportation and Centers for Disease Control), which ran as pre-rolls to short videos promoting extremist (terrorist) or other controversial content, led to some brands boycotting YouTube ads (Hickman, 2017; Wakabayashi and Maheshwari, 2017). These advertisers had brand safety “guardrails” in place to prevent their ads appearing next to content that contrasts with their brand’s values (Murphy et al, 2018). This study investigated the third brand safety effect, the effects of extremist and other videos on pre-roll ad effectiveness, measured by brand recall, recognition, ad liking, brand attitude, and purchase intention, as well as by biometrics measures of emotional response
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