Celtra has taken a look at video content in mobile rich media ads, researching 151 such ads viewed by more than 730,000 people running on AdCreator in Q4 2012, using a “balanced sample of different ad formats run across different publishers and networks.” The study finds that despite theories of short attention spans on mobile, completion rates for very short videos (less than 30 seconds), which were almost all re-used classic TV commercials, had the lowest completion rate (35.8%), behind even the longest ads (150 seconds and longer), which had a roughly 50% completion rate.
Breaking down video attention span by content, the study finds that completion rates for trailers (47.7%) was significantly higher than for video commercials (43.5%). The researchers theorize that “users are not too keen to watch commercials they’ve already seen on TV in their mobile ads again,” a not too surprising result, but one that is nonetheless interesting to see supported by research. Celtra believes that as mobile becomes a more important piece of online ad campaigns, advertisers will need to create content content specifically for those devices.
Still, the researchers note that while content taken from other media and reused on mobile might not perform as well, it still does so “well enough,” particularly for video.
Overall 15% of users who interacted with a rich media ad that contained video decided to watch the video, which made this the most successful mobile ad content.
